Using a large sample of Chinese listed companies during period from 2005 to 2014, this paper investigates whether the managerial characteristics of Chairman affect earnings management. Using McNichols [1] accrual-based and Roychowdhury [2] real earning management, we find that companies with female, long-tenured, older and more educated Chairman have lower absolute discretionary accruals and lo...

The singular focus of public debate on the "top 1 percent" of households overlooks the component of earnings inequality that is arguably most consequential for the "other 99 percent" of citizens: the dramatic growth in the wage premium associated with higher education and cognitive ability. This Review documents the central role of both the supply and demand for skills in shaping inequality, di...

As women's labor-force participation and earnings have grown, so has the likelihood that wives outearn their husbands. A common concern is that these couples may be at heightened risk of divorce. Yet with the rise of egalitarian marriage, wives' relative earnings may be more weakly associated with divorce than in the past. We examine trends in the association between wives' relative earnings an...

Increases in the association between spouses' earnings have the potential to increase inequality as marriages increasingly consist of two high-earning or two low-earning partners. This article uses log-linear models and data from the March Current Population Survey to describe trends in the association between spouses' earnings and estimate their contribution to growing earnings inequality amon...

Firms scheduled to report earnings earn an annualized abnormal return of 9.9%. We propose a risk-based explanation for this phenomenon, in which investors use announcements to revise their expectations for non-announcing …rms, but can only do so imperfectly. Consequently, the covariance between …rm-speci…c and market cash-‡ow news spikes around announcements, making announcers especially risky....

We examine the effects of rivals’ earnings news during the waiting period of an IPO’s going public process on IPO pricing and completion decision, and investigate the implication of these effects for post-IPO operating performance. We find that a signal-to-noise measure of rivals’ earnings news has significantly negative valuation effects on both price revision and initial return for completed ...

This paper studies market and analyst reactions to earnings (i) during a proxy contest for board seats and (ii) after a proxy-contest-induced management change. Despite indications of earnings management during the proxy contest, market and analyst reactions are more pronounced than in prior periods, and earnings surprises explain more of the cross-sectional variation in these reactions. Market...