No abstract

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.

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This paper investigates whether top executives have significant individual‐specific effects on accruals that cannot be explained by firm characteristics. Exploiting individual executive and firm data from a period of 37 years, we find that individual executives play a significant role in determining firms’ accruals. We examine whether executives’ effects on accruals are related to their personal styles on firm policies, investment, financing and operating decisions. Our results show that individual executives’ effects on accruals are more correlated with their operating decisions than investment and financing decisions. We next investigate whether managers themselves also have a personal style for directly affecting accruals. We compare effects exerted by CEOs to CFOs. We find CEOs are more likely to affect accruals through firm policy decisions and CFOs are more likely to affect accruals through accounting decisions. CFOs tend to report more ‘solid’ earnings than CEOs, i.e., CFOs are more likely to push accruals to zero.

We investigate the impact of Form 8-K filings on cross-firm differences in analysts' private or idiosyncratic information in the post-Reg FD era. Using firms' connections to the investment community to identify the likelihood of selective disclosure, we document differences in analysts' idiosyncratic information arising from selective disclosure before 8-K filings. While filings of 8-Ks pursuant to Reg FD attenuate the link between connections and analysts' idiosyncratic information, they do so only after selective disclosures have already resulted in some analysts having better private information. In addition, the connections continue to facilitate private information search after the filings of non-Reg FD-specific 8-Ks. K E Y W O R D S analysts' idiosyncratic information, connections, Form 8-K filing, selective disclosure J E L C L A S S I F I C AT I O N G14, M41