This study explores the interplay between public measures adopted by the U.S. government to combat COVID-19 and the performance of the American hospitality industry. The recent global pandemic is a natural experiment for exploring the role of government interventions and their direct impact on hospitality stock returns in the U.S. financial market. Overall, our findings show that most of the government interventions were associated with a negative response in the returns of the hospitality industry, a response that became more negative as the COVID-19 pandemic evolved. Similar patterns were also detected for other industries such as entertainment and transportation that are closely related to hospitality. The findings we document are fundamental to understanding the trends and fluctuations in hospitality stocks in the current crisis and any similar crisis in the future.

No abstract

The recent accounting scandals brought into light the failure of corporate governance mechanisms to curbing earnings management. This study focuses on the insiders who design the managers' compensation contracts. The contract designers are seen as lacking the financial expertise to correctly uncover the true outcome. However by virtue of their knowledge of the contract details, they can discern the likelihood that the firm's public report is not truthful. Modeling the firm as a principal-agent contract, we show that insiders induce earnings management and make trading gains by designing suboptimal incentives. Given that our results are driven largely by the lack of these directors' financial expertise, our study has the policy implication that inclusion of financial experts in compensation committees can contribute to transparencies under the current insider trading rules in place.

Since the decision on the reported outcome is delegated to the management of the firm, it is commonly held that when the capital market is imperfect the manager achieves consumption smoothing by smoothing the reports relative to the actual outcome. Modeling the firm as a principal‐agent contract shows the contrary. When the capital market is imperfect the firm's reporting strategy is conservative, as the manager never reports more than the actual outcome because of fear of an unfavorable future outcome. When the capital market is perfect the firm either smooths the report‐reports more than the actual outcome when the actual outcome is low and reports less than the actual outcome when the outcome is hig‐or reports more than the actual outcome in order to take advantage of the sharing rule being an increasing function of the report.

No abstract