Publications.

This study investigates the role of salient events on accrual-based and real earnings management activities. For people using availability heuristics, the salience of an event may temporarily increase perceived risk even though the actual risk does not change, and individuals making decisions by availability heuristics are subsequently more likely to assign a higher probability to unrelated negative future events. I use terrorist attacks and mass shootings as salient events and conjecture that the negative effects of terrorist attacks and mass shootings spill over and lead to pessimistic risk assessments of financial reporting choices. The findings show a decrease in accrual-based and real earnings management for firms located in the impacted regions. The documented effects are driven by firms with high information asymmetry levels and pessimistic annual reports. Additional analysis reveals that affected firms decrease the readability of their annual reports, suggesting affected firms engage in a more complex narrative disclosure. The findings of this paper support the argument that managers exhibit a cognitive bias which affects their financial reporting choices.

The online response to customer complaints, also known as service recovery, is a central feature of modern organizations' customer-focused performance management systems. Motivated by the lack of descriptive information related to complaint handling that can be used in assessing managerial performance, we collect organizations' responses to consumer complaints via Twitter and apply Zemke and Schaaf's (1990) traditional service recovery model to explore these. We collected 10,305 tweets that describe the use of Twitter for service recovery by organizations across four industries: airlines, casual dining chain restaurants, hotels, and fast-food restaurants. The findings show that in our sample, the traditional service recovery model with five service recovery elements (apology, urgent reinstatement, empathy, symbolic atonement, and follow-up) is implemented to various degrees. Furthermore, we identify three additional service recovery elements not previously discussed by prior research: channel transfer, feedback acknowledgment, and information request. Our findings have research implications and highlight the importance of incorporating online customer complaints into managerial performance systems.

We quantitatively measure the interactions between daily consumption and the stock market. We find that daily consumption, proxied by the cyclical component of theatrical box office earnings, can significantly and positively predict stock returns for up to five days. We also demonstrate a trading strategy using our consumption measures that yield nontrivial excess returns with little risk. These findings suggest that the box office effect is an economically important factor for equities. The framework implies that daily consumption carries value-relevant public information, which leads to price reaction at a daily frequency.

This research aims to advance the literature by identifying the association between four advertising media vehicles (Internet, press, outdoor, television) and contemporaneous sales. Previous research highlights the influence of advertising on firm value but does not delve into the effects of advertising media vehicles. Employing primary data, which detail the advertising expenditures of 88 publicly traded companies over 11 years, we empirically show a positive association between television and outdoor advertising expenditures and contemporaneous sales. However, we do not find any significant results for press and Internet advertising. We investigate the moderating effect of the growth opportunities, industry sectors, and firm size. Our study offers important evidence that the contemporaneous relationship between sales and advertising expenditures varies by media vehicle. We discuss the implications of our findings for the matching principle, a principal concept in accrual accounting.

Beginning in 2010, mandated Financial Accounting Standards No. 166 and 167 (SFAS 166/167) changed the consolidation rules of securitization entities and required more information about their securitization activities. I find that securitizing banks experienced a decrease in information asymmetry from the pre- to the post-SFAS 166/167 periods, and that more visible securitizing banks are less sensitive to SFAS 166/167. These inferences are robust to a number of sensitivity analyses. This study is one of the first to provide evidence of the effects of SFAS 166/167 on the information asymmetry of securitizing banks.