We examine the role of teamwork within the top executive teams in generating management forecasts. Using social connections within the executive team to capture the team’s interaction, cooperation, and teamwork, we find that social connections among team members are associated with higher management forecast accuracy, consistent with economic theories that information is dispersed within a firm and with sociology insights that social connections facilitate information sharing. Further analyses show that the association between social connections and forecast accuracy is stronger when the teams are just beginning to work together, when their firms face more uncertainty or adversity, and when the CEOs are less powerful. Our results hold for a subsample of executive teams that experience pseudo exogenous shocks to their social connectedness. Taken together, our results underscore the importance of teamwork among executives in the forecast generation process. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting.

Boards of directors play their role in corporate governance by advising and/or monitoring managers. In the corporate disclosure literature, prior research has documented directors' monitoring role, yet empirical evidence on directors' advising role is limited. Since the advising role often entails information transfer, we examine directors who concurrently serve as directors or executives in the firms' related industries (DRIs) and hence possess valuable information about the firms' external operating environment. We hypothesize and find that more DRIs on boards are associated with more accurate management forecasts. This association is stronger when firms face greater uncertainty, and holds in settings where DRIs are unlikely to monitor managers, suggesting a distinct advising role of DRIs. Our study highlights directors' role as information suppliers and advisors who help shape corporate voluntary disclosure.

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