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Research summary: We provide evidence that founder chief executive officers (CEOs) of large S&P 1500 companies are more overconfident than their nonfounder counterparts (\"professional CEOs\"). We measure overconfidence via tone of CEO tweets, tone of CEO statements during earnings conference calls, management earnings forecasts, and CEO option-exercise behavior. Compared with professional CEOs, founder CEOs use more optimistic language on Twitter and during earnings conference calls. In addition, founder CEOs are more likely to issue earnings forecasts that are too high; they are also more likely to perceive their firms to be undervalued, as implied by their option-exercise behavior. We provide evidence that, to date, investors appear unaware of this \"overconfidence bias\" among founders. Managerial summary: This article helps to explain why firms managed by founder chief executive officers (CEOs) behave differently from those managed by professional CEOs. We study a sample of S&P 1500 firms and find strong evidence that founder CEOs are more overconfident than professional CEOs. To date, investors appear unaware of this overconfidence bias among founders. Our study should help firm stakeholders, including investors, employees, suppliers, and customers, put the statements and actions of founder CEOs in perspective. Our study should also help members of corporate boards make more informed decisions about whether to retain (or bring back) founder CEOs or hire professional CEOs.

This paper documents that changes in litigation risk affect corporate voluntary disclosure practices. We make causal inferences by exploiting three legal events that generate exogenous variations in firms' litigation risk. Using a matching-based fixed-effect difference-in-differences design, we find that the treated firms tend to make fewer (more) management earnings forecasts relative to the control firms when they expect litigation risk to be lower (higher) following the legal event. The results are concentrated on the earnings forecasts conveying negative news and are robust to alternative specifications, samples, and outcome variables.

We document that textual discussions in a sample of 363,952 analyst reports provide information to investors beyond that in the contemporaneously released earnings forecasts, stock recommendations, and target prices, and also assist investors in interpreting these signals. Cross-sectionally, we find that investors react more strongly to negative than to positive text, suggesting that analysts are especially important in propagating bad news. Additional evidence indicates that analyst report text is more useful when it places more emphasis on nonfinancial topics, is written more assertively and concisely, and when the perceived validity of other information signals in the same report is low. Finally, analyst report text is shown to have predictive value for future earnings growth in the subsequent five years.

This study investigates the role of foreign institutional investors (FIIs) in restraining earnings management activities of firms under varying levels of investor protection. Firms manage their earnings less when independent FIIs are among their shareholders, especially for firms in which monitoring is more valuable – firms in weak investor protection countries and when firms have greater growth opportunities. These effects are robust to a quasi-exogenous shock to FIIs’ shareholdings, unobserved firm heterogeneity, and alternative earning management measures. FIIs are associated with an increase in foreign director presence on corporate boards and audit committees.

Stocks with higher forecast dispersion earn lower future returns and have a greater upward bias in the mean reported earnings forecast in international markets. Both phenomena are stronger in countries with more transparent information environments, more developed stock markets, stronger investor protection, greater capital openness, and more intense usage of analysts' earnings forecasts. Using the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis as a natural experiment, we find that both phenomena become weaker postcrisis in Malaysia, which imposed capital controls, relative to Thailand and South Korea, which opened their financial markets to foreigners. These results suggest that analysts in countries with greater demand for their forecasts and hence greater concerns for reputations are more likely to self-censor their low forecasts, which leads to a stronger dispersion-bias relation and a stronger dispersion effect.

Investor protection is associated with greater investment sensitivity to q and lower investment sensitivity to cash flow. Finance plays a role in causing these effects; in countries with strong investor protection, external finance increases more strongly with q, and declines more strongly with cash flow. We further find that q and cash flow sensitivities are associated with ex post investment efficiency; investment predicts growth and profits more strongly in countries with greater q sensitivities and lower cash flow sensitivities. The paper's findings are broadly consistent with investor protection promoting accurate share prices, reducing financial constraints, and encouraging efficient investment.

The \"antidirector rights index\" has been used as a measure of shareholder protection in over a hundred articles since it was introduced by La Porta et al. (\" Law and Finance.\" 1998, Journal of Political Economy 106: 1113-55). A thorough reexamination of the legal data, however, leads to corrections for thirty-three of the forty-six countries analyzed. The correlation between corrected and original values is only 0.53. Consequently, many empirical results established using the original index may not be replicable with corrected values. In particular, the corrected index fails to support three widely influential claims: that shareholder protection is higher in common than in civil law countries; that shareholder protection predicts stock market size or ownership dispersion; and that weak corporate governance explains the extent of exchange rate depreciation during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998.

Better investor protection could lead corporations to undertake riskier but value-enhancing investments. For example, better investor protection mitigates the taking of private benefits leading to excess risk-avoidance. Further, in better investor protection environments, stakeholders like creditors, labor groups, and the government are less effective in reducing corporate risk-taking for their self-interest. However, arguments can also be made for a negative relationship between investor protection and risk-taking. Using a cross-country panel and a U.S.-only sample, we find that corporate risk-taking and firm growth rates are positively related to the quality of investor protection.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the inter-relations among the strength of investor protection institutions, earnings management (EM) and the COVID-19 pandemic. Design/methodology/approach As a proxy for EM, the authors use discretionary accruals measure, estimated using the modified Jones model (1991). As a proxy for the strength of investor protection institutions, the study uses the Investor Protection Index, extracted from the Global Competitiveness Reports. The sample consists of 5,519 firms listed in the Group of Twelve countries during 2015–2020. Findings The study shows that firms tend to engage less in EM during the pandemic period. The authors also find a significantly negative relation between the strength of investor protection institutions and EM practices, and interestingly, this negative relation was found to be more pronounced during the pandemic period. Research limitations/implications For investors and practitioners, the findings help get insights into the behavior of firms in response of the pandemic shock in countries with solid institutional and legal protection. For policymakers, the findings reaffirm the critical role that institutional incentives and reforms can play, in influencing firms to exert more efforts to promote their financial reporting quality. Originality/value To the best of our knowledge, the study is one of the first attempts to examine the link between EM practices and investor protection during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings extend both the literature on the role of institutional factors in promoting the earnings quality and the literature on COVID-19’s effect on firm performance and practices.