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Analyst Earning Forecasts and Advertising and R&D Budgets: Role of Agency Theoretic Monitoring and Bonding Costs
Abstract
Because security analysts, who serve as brokers between public firms and investors, arrive at their forecasts by incorporating guidance from managers, there is immense pressure on the managers to meet or beat analyst earnings forecasts; moreover, investors reward (penalize) firms for exceeding (missing) analyst forecasts. Reasoning that decisions taken in response to analyst forecasts involve discretionary budgets, the authors study four contingent conditions under which quarterly analyst forecasts drive unanticipated adjustments to advertising and R&D budgets, and the long-term consequences of these budgetary changes. The choice of contingent conditions is related to agency theory-driven concepts of monitoring and bonding costs. Results from a panel data set of 515 firms and a hierarchical Bayesian model that provides firm-level coefficients show that both artificially imposed incentives on managers (monitoring costs) and personal career management concerns (bonding costs) moderate the extent to which managers react to analyst forecasts. Specifically, (1) bonus versus equity proportion of CEO compensation enhances the likelihood of managers reacting to analyst forecasts with unanticipated decreases in advertising and R&D budgets; (2) output experience of CEOs decreases this likelihood; (3) throughput experience of CEOs increases this likelihood; and (4) increasing marketing and R&D intensity decreases this likelihood. The authors also find that the unanticipated adjustments in advertising and R&D budgets adversely affect long-term firm returns and risk.
... Financial analysts play a critical role in capital markets as they draw on their expertise to provide valuable information in the form of earnings forecasts and stock recommendations P e e r R e v i e w V e r s i o n 11 (Huang et al. 2018). By doing so, analysts shape information environment in capital markets (Chakravarty and Grewal 2016). Higher dispersion amongst analysts forecasts about future earnings, that is, analyst uncertainty, therefore, is a critical concern that increases market friction and reduces market efficiency (FASB 2016;Beyer et al. 2010). ...
... Analyst uncertainty is likely to shape investor uncertainty as analyst forecasts are a valuable source of information for investors (Chakravarty and Grewal 2016). Given that analysts serve as critical information intermediaries in capital markets, the negative effect of disclosure of advertising spending on idiosyncratic risk is likely to be driven by the degree to which it lowers analyst uncertainty. ...
... Agency theory focuses on information asymmetry and conflict of interest between the principal and the agent (Eisenhardt 1989). Financial markets present a classical agency problem due to information asymmetry between investors (the principal) and managers (the agent A key tenet of agency theory is that the principal will incur monitoring costs to ensure that the agent behaves in a manner that is consistent with her objectives (see Chakravarty and Grewal 2016 Advertising spending informs analysts of the extent to which a manager allocates financial resources on advertising. This information is critical for firms with higher liquidity because "when firms are flush with cash, they tend to spend liberally on advertising, even beyond what seems necessary or desirable." ...
Publicly listed firms have the discretion to disclose (or not) advertising spending in their annual (10-K) reports. The disclosure of advertising spending can provide valuable information because advertising is a leading indicator of future performance. However, estimates of advertising spending are available from data providers, arguably mitigating the need for its formal disclosure. This study argues that firms’ disclosure of advertising spending provides more complete and public information and therefore lowers investor uncertainty about future firm performance (idiosyncratic risk). Empirical analyses show this effect is largely driven by the negative effect of disclosure of advertising spending on analyst uncertainty. Consistent with agency theory, the negative effect of the disclosure of advertising spending on analyst uncertainty is stronger for firms with more financial resources, lower disclosure quality, and that are in more competitive industries. Additional analyses show that the disclosure of advertising spending has a significant positive effect on firm value in specific sectors. These results, therefore, identify an avenue for Chief Marketing Officers to play a greater role in managing investor relations. In addition, they suggest strong merit for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Accounting Standards Board to reconsider current regulations governing advertising spending disclosure.
... However, if the market expectation of the institution is much lower than the actual operating performance of the enterprise, enterprise managers will become more aggressive and pay more attention to the high returns brought by the success of high-risk strategies [15,16]. Concurrently, if the market expectation of the institution is slightly higher than the actual operating performance of the enterprise, the managers will face few performance pressures, and in order to meet or exceed the market expectation of the institution, the innovation input will be reduced [8,17]. However, if the market expectation of the institution is much higher than the actual operating performance of the enterprise, in order to meet the market expectation, enterprise managers will be more inclined to adopt revolutionary strategies and increase R&D input [18][19][20]. ...
... (2) Independent variables: The previous studies show that the measurement indicators of market expectation mainly include the median of expected indicators such as per-share earnings, leading business income and net profit, gaps between expected indicators and actual indicators of enterprises, and the overall rating [17,19]. Therefore, referring to previous studies, and considering that the prediction and evaluation of institutions are usually effective in the short term, this paper chooses the period of the comprehensive forecast value as 180 days, using the prediction value at the end of the t-1 year and the prediction value in the middle of the t year to measure MEG and MER, and the formula for calculation is as follows: (3) Moderating variables: the moderators mainly consider the impact of government institutional environment and capital market environment on enterprise innovation in this paper. ...
... On the other hand, if the market expected performance of institutions is slightly higher than the actual operating performance of enterprises, facing the external expectation pressure, managers will reduce the innovation input with risk and uncertainty to maintain their reputations and realize the short-term performance of enterprises [17], because the increase of innovation input cannot make the operating performance grow well immediately, but will increase the operating cost, which makes the short-term performance of enterprise less able to achieve the market expectation performance. ...
Under the strategic background of Made-in-China to Mind-in-China, how the capital market expectation affects enterprise innovation input has reached no coincident conclusion. This paper uses Chinese A-share manufacturing listed companies from 2010 to 2017 to investigate the internal mechanism among the gap and rating of market expectation and enterprise innovation input, and further explores the moderating effects of institutional coverage and government subsidies. The results show that: firstly, innovation input will first decrease and then increase with the market expectation gap increase. However, innovation input will first increase and then decrease with the market expectation rating increase. Secondly, when the institutional coverage and government subsidies increase, innovation input will remarkably transform from the first decrease and then increase into the first increase, then decrease with the market expectation gap increase. Finally, when institutional coverage is high and government subsidies are low, innovation input will remarkably transform from the first increase and then decrease into the first decrease, and then increase with the market expectation rating increases. These research findings can provide some academic support and policy references for managers to deal with effectively external performance pressures, institutional coverage, and optimize government subsidies to promote manufacturers’ innovation-driven upgrading.
... For example, Xerox Corporation, the once global leader in the business printing services market, is losing its market share to new cloud-based service providers, such as Amazon, because it failed to continuously innovate (Hiltzik, 2018). In addition, the myopic marketing management literature suggests that pressure to meet financial market expectations also encourages managers to be short-term oriented (e.g., Chakravarty & Grewal, 2016;Mizik, 2010;Mizik & Jacobson, 2007). For example, Mizik and Jacobson (2003) find that the stock market reacts positively, when firms increase their emphases on value-appropriation. ...
... Studies that draw on the agency theory view, suggest that managers choose strategies that will better serve their personal interests. For example, research suggests that when risk averse managers face potential losses of personal benefits, they devote more effort to improving shortterm returns that increase benefits to them (Chakravarty & Grewal, 2016;Currim et al., 2012). This phenomenon is exacerbated, when large companies compensate their leaders with bonusbased salaries (Harris & Bromiley, 2007). ...
... Compensation strategy is defined as the percentage of salary that is bonus-based (Chakravarty & Grewal, 2016). The way in which a manager is compensated can affect strategic choice (Dow & Raposo, 2005). ...
Top management's choices regarding strategic emphases (e.g., value-creation versus value-appropriation) are an important component of firms' success. While extant research has explored the effects of strategic emphasis on firm performance, few studies have examined the factors that affect top management's strategic emphasis choices. The study addresses this gap by examining the relationship between management's entrepreneurial orientation and its relative strategic emphasis on value-creation versus value-appropriation. In addition, it investigates the moderating roles of relative performance, compensation strategy, and capital market patience, on the above relationship. Using a multi-source dataset of 337 Standard & Poor (S&P) 500 companies from 2007-2015, we find that entrepreneurially oriented managers tend to focus more on value-creation (e.g., new product development) over value-appropriation (e.g., advertising), but this influence is contingent on, at least, three factors: (1) relative firm performance, (2) compensation strategy, and (3) capital market patience. The study provides a broad theoretical foundation that explicates key factors that influence firms' resource allocation decisions.
... On an average, CFOs planned to cut back marketing expenses by 11 % due to adverse financial performance 2 , which was the highest item on their list. Obviously, all instances of REAM do not coincide with financial crisis, and instead, REAM may occur on an ongoing basis depending on varying financial performance requirements (e.g., [18]). ...
... Thus, meeting analyst earnings forecasts might motivate managers to inflate shortterm earnings. [18] and Currim et al. [31] demonstrate that analyst forecast-related pressures do motivate shortterm marketing spending decisions that inflate short-term earnings. Investor sentiment is another potent measure of performance expectation such that low investor sentiments can trigger resource reductions to boost short-term performance. ...
This manuscript represents a literature synthesis of REal Activity Manipulation research and practices in marketing with the objective of stimulating further research. It provides up-to-date knowledge of REAM from multiple perspectives. Research progress on identification and measurement of REAM, inference of managerial motivations, impact on performance metrics, and mitigating conditions is discussed. This review provides several directions for future research as well, thereby highlighting the research priority of the Marketing Accountability and Standards Board effort to augment the calls on managers to be accountable for marketing spending.
... Controlling for firm stock market performance, we include stock returns (Markovitch et al. 2005). Because firms tend to be benchmarked against their industry peers for stock performance comparisons, we follow Chakravarty and Grewal (2016) and use a dummy variable that takes a value of 1 if the firm's stock return exceeds industry-averaged stock returns and 0 otherwise. Industry average returns are the equally weighted average of stock returns of all firms in a given four-digit SIC industry. ...
... We add a control for firm size to account for economies of scale (Chung and Low 2017), which we operationalize as the logarithm of total assets. We employ one-period lags of the control variables because this represents the most recent information available to managers when they decide on budgets at the beginning of the current period (Chakravarty and Grewal 2016;Currim, Lim, and Kim 2012). Finally, we include controls for shareholder complaint details that are not captured by our moderating factors but could influence an advertising investment response. ...
Shareholder complaints put pressure on publicly listed firms, yet firms rarely directly address the actual issues raised in these complaints. The authors examine whether firms respond in an alternative way by altering advertising investments in an effort to ward off the financial damage associated with shareholder complaints. By analyzing a unique data set of shareholder complaints submitted to S&P 1500 firms between 2001 and 2016, supplemented with qualitative interviews of executives of publicly listed firms, the authors document that firms increase advertising investments following shareholder complaints and that such an advertising investment response mitigates a postcomplaint decline in firm value. Furthermore, results suggest that firms are more likely to increase advertising investments when shareholder complaints are submitted by institutional investors, pertain to nonfinancial concerns, and relate to topics that receive high media attention. The findings provide new insights on how firms address stock market adversities with advertising investments and inform managers about the effectiveness of such a response.
... At the macro level, existing research mainly concentrates on the impact of the policy uncertainty [28], social capital [29], tax policy [30][31][32], and government subsidies [33,34] on corporate innovation. At the meso level, scholars mainly emphasize relevant factors such as region, industry, and market participants, specifically, the impact of product market [35], analysts [36,37], and institutional investors [38,39] on corporate innovation. At the micro level, most studies have explored the influencing factors of innovation from internal factors of enterprises, such as corporate culture [40], CEO personal characteristics [41], executive compensation [42,43], executive background and experience [44][45][46], and ownership structure [47]. ...
Digitalization has brought great changes to economic and social development, and corporate digital transformation has gradually become the focus of academic attention. We explore the economic impacts of digital transformation from the perspective of corporate innovation utilizing a sample of China’s A-share listed manufacturing firms from 2008 to 2020, depending on the quasi-natural experiment of “Integration of Informatization & Industrialization”. Using the difference-in-differences (DID) model, we document that the growth of innovation considerably tends to rise via corporate digital transformation, and top management team (TMT) heterogeneity plays a positively moderating role in this process. The findings are still reliable after the parallel trend test, PSM-DID, placebo test, and the test of excluding alternative explanations. Extended analyses find that the innovation incentive effect of digital transformation will enhance corporate value in the later stage. Our findings not only contribute to the advancement of the study in digital transformation, but also offer theoretical support and useful advice for furthering corporate digitalization and upgrading the mechanism for creative growth.
... The development experience of CEOs is associated with greater exploration and change efforts (Barker and Mueller, 2002). Leadership style depends in many cases on occasion: a professional background in output-related functions like R&D fosters growth strategies and sustains innovation expenses so, pursuing organic growth through innovation; furthermore, a manager whose cognitive base includes R&D is more likely to foster a firm's technological innovation via patenting (Chakravarty and Grewal, 2016). Therefore, we propose: H4: The level of education of owners positively influences the number of granted patents. ...
As digital transformation accelerates, generating demand for new digital products, processes, and technologies, it is necessary to create consensus among all the actors involved on the company's digital innovation strategies. Owners greatly influence a company's objectives and design: they represent a group to which the top management must pay particular attention. Understanding which individual aspects of the owners influence digital innovation processes becomes very important. However, studies on the impact of owners' characteristics on digital innovation are rare. This article analyzes over 550 patent-holder firms engaged in digital innovation to fill this gap. The study evaluates the relationship between owners’ characteristics and patenting activity. The results show a significant impact of gender diversity, education, and minority status of the owners on digital innovation. By favoring a deeper understanding of the profile of owners concerning digital innovation, the findings of this study help top management identify more effective engagement strategies for a better performance of the digital transformation process.
... When enterprises fail to properly absorb and utilize resources, innovation performance hardly improves with the increase in technological innovation input [33][34][35]. Even though, in some cases, excessive investment in technological innovation encourages managers to use redundant organizational resources to pursue private interests, such as high salary and high authority, it makes it difficult to continuously improve the innovation performance of enterprises and may inhibit enterprise innovation [36][37][38]. ...
Taking Chinese listed companies from 2010 to 2019 as research samples, in this paper, the authors empirically analyze the impact of technological innovation enthusiasm on innovation performance from a nonlinear perspective. The research finds that an inverted, U-shaped relationship exists between technological innovation enthusiasm and innovation performance, that is, to a certain extent, the improvement of the enthusiasm for technological innovation can improve the innovation performance of companies. However, when the enthusiasm for technological innovation reaches a certain degree, the innovation performance declines with the improvement of technological innovation enthusiasm. In addition, the moderating effect of CEO succession on the relationship between technological innovation enthusiasm and innovation performance is investigated from the perspective of corporate governance, and the research conclusions show that CEO succession strengthens the inverted, U-shaped relationship between technological innovation enthusiasm and innovation performance. This study further enriches the theoretical framework of technological innovation and corporate governance, and the relevant conclusions can provide certain theoretical reference for the innovation performance improvement of listed companies in China.
... This paper calculates the logarithm of the total assets at the year-end to measure the company's scale. As a result, this paper controls the company's asset scale, ROA, ROE, a ratio of intangible assets to total assets, a growth rate of sales revenue, a ratio of the market value of equity to the book value of net assets, cash flow per share, asset-liability ratio, retained earnings ratio, industry effect, and annual effect [44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60]. ...
This paper studies the influence of the annual cumulative earnings of Chinese listed TPA (targeted poverty alleviation) companies before 2004 on the companies’ value using data from 2012 to 2019, measures the long-term earnings persistence of these companies with the variable of the cumulative earnings averaged by the market price of each company at the current year’s end, and obtains a model of the company’s value combined with each company’s earnings persistence and the long-term competitive strength of its products. The cumulative data from 2004 to 2012, 2005 to 2013, and 2011 to 2019 provide the data used for regression from 2012 to 2019. The TPA companies’ value is affected by long-term cumulative net profits and long-term competitive advantage. The higher the company’s accumulated net profit, the longer the duration of the long-term competitive advantage, the more stable the company’s value increase, and the higher the quality of the value increase.
... If a manager's cognitive base includes R&D and engineering experience, she or he is relatively more likely to aim to improve a firm's technological trajectory via patenting (Chakravarty & Grewal, 2016). Major strategic decisions are usually subject to the final approval of the CEO (Marcel, 2009). ...
This article investigates the role of chief operating officers’ (COOs’) characteristics and their relation to the exploration modes of patenting and venturing. It relies on the upper echelons view to explain how COOs’ demographic and professional background features – represented by their career horizon, gender, and functional experience – may influence the path those COOs choose to conduct exploration. Based on a ten-year cross-industry panel of U.S. firms, the results provide support for the notion that distinct COO profiles relate to organizational exploration efforts. While COOs with long career horizons are associated negatively with patenting activity, they positively relate to corporate venturing activity. Female COOs are positively related to venturing, though no relation can be observed for patenting. COOs with backgrounds in development are positively associated with patenting activity and insignificantly related to venturing. This research adds to the debate on how functional top executives matter for firm exploration.
... No que diz respeito à sua relação com os intangíveis, a dispersão da previsão é capaz de refletir a incerteza gerada pelos intangíveis sobre os lucros futuros da empresa, a qualidade da informação, podendo também ser interpretada como uma medida alternativa de assimetria de informação no mercado de capitais (Barron et al., 1998;Chakravarty & Grewal, 2016). Seguindo a mesma perspectiva abordada para a construção da primeira hipótese, empresas com maior grau de intangibilidade atraem uma maior cobertura e, dessa forma, aumentam a acessibilidade de informações (Kwon, 2002). ...
Este estudo objetivou verificar a influência dos intangíveis sobre a acurácia e a dispersão das previsões de lucros feita pelos analistas financeiros. A execução deste estudo foi motivada ao observar que a literatura sugere que os intangíveis podem influenciar as previsões dos analistas. Contudo, os resultados verificados são divergentes, não havendo um consenso a respeito da direção dessa influência nos trabalhos à questão. Para atingir os objetivos de pesquisa, utilizou-se uma amostra de empresas americanas não financeiras com ações negociadas na Nasdaq, no período de 1995 a 2016, a partir do método OLS (Ordinary Least Squares − Mínimos Quadrados Ordinários), conforme adotado pela maior parte da literatura internacional encontrada acerca do tema. A escolha dessa amostra se deu pela maior disponibilidade dos dados dos intangíveis e da cobertura dos analistas, pela comparabilidade com resultados existentes na literatura e pelo fato de a respectiva bolsa concentrar empresas com maior grau de intangibilidade, foco do trabalho. Desse modo, os principais resultados apontaram que os investimentos em P&D e ativos intangíveis reconhecidos são capazes de melhorar as previsões dos analistas. Contudo, o Goodwill mostrou-se negativamente relacionado com as previsões dos analistas ao reduzir a acurácia e aumentar a dispersão das previsões. Concluiu-se, então, a possibilidade em confirmar a existência de associação entre os intangíveis e as previsões dos analistas, além de ter fornecido indícios de que a direção dessa influência não pode ser generalizada a todos intangíveis, a depender do nível de incerteza e complexidade informacional do intangível estudado.
... The positive effect of BMI on firm performance embodies in the mechanism of promoting R&D investment (Cortimiglia et al., 2015). As R&D activity is costly and will consume massive resources, the firm will control R&D investment to reduce cost under the logic of a cost leadership strategy (Chakravarty and Grewal, 2016), which may decrease the firm's performance correspondingly. In addition, new a business model calls for holistic reform of the operational mode, which is also costly. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to examine how business model innovation (BMI) mediates the relationship between integrative capability, business strategy and firm performance.
Design/methodology/approach
A literature review provides the model and hypotheses. Using a sample of 165 Chinese firms, the authors conduct the examination using a theoretical model and hypotheses following standard analysis methods.
Findings
The results show that BMI positively mediates the relationship between integrative capability and firm performance. Moreover, a differentiation strategy positively moderates the link between BMI and firm performance, while a cost leadership strategy presents a significantly negative moderating effect.
Research limitations/implications
First, the authors test the hypotheses using data from China; thus data from other emerging economies should be tested. Second, the authors use cross-sectional data in this study making it impossible to verify the dynamic developed in the process of BMI; a longitudinal study could provide a more comprehensive understanding. Third, the authors consider one intermediate mechanism to test the relationship of integrative capability and firm performance; additional factors may link integrative capability and firm performance.
Practical implications
The mediating effect of BMI suggests managers should pay more attention to BMI to improve firm performance, and they should understand that BMI’s role varies across different business strategies.
Originality/value
The paper is original in its investigation of the effect of integrative capability and BMI on firm performance using data from China and demonstrates the mediating effect of BMI on the relationship between integrative capability and firm performance.
... Specifically, in Equation 8, we operationalize the continuous independent variables and control variables as unanticipated changes in those variables. Following Chakravarty and Grewal (2016), we extract the unanticipated portion of the variables by obtaining the residuals from a first-order autoregressive model as follows: ...
Value-appropriation activities enable a firm to extract more profits from existing customers. The authors examine how investments in two types of value-appropriation activities—advertising and receivables—are jointly associated with abnormal stock returns and idiosyncratic risk. Using data from 1,375 firms over the period of 2003–2015, the authors find that advertising investments and receivables investments interact as substitutes, such that increasing advertising (receivables) investments is detrimental to the beneficial effect of receivables (advertising) investments on firm shareholder value. They find that this association is contingent on firm business scope, such that the joint effect of advertising investments and receivables investments becomes weaker when firms have a broader business scope compared with a narrower business scope.
... If functional experience endows board members with unique perspective and skill, what incremental contribution does marketing expertise provide at the board level beyond other functional experience? Output function (e.g., sales, marketing) training emphasizes the identification of demand-increasing opportunities, though output-trained executives are rarely included on boards (e.g., Chakravarty and Grewal 2016;Hambrick and Mason 1984). Marketers are trained and incentivized throughout their careers to prioritize growth in their strategies, and CEOs hold marketers primarily accountable for driving revenue growth (e.g., Accenture 2018). ...
Scholars have expressed concern that marketing’s influence at the strategic levels of the firm is waning. Consistent with this view, only 2.6% of all board-of-director members have marketing experience. We suggest this is short-sighted and that including more marketing-experienced board members (MEBM) will increase firm growth by helping firms prioritize growth as a strategic objective and by contributing expertise to improve the effectiveness of revenue growth strategies. Drawing on the behavioral model of corporate governance, we develop a theoretical framework explicating the situational, dispositional, and structural influence moderators that alter the impact of MEBM on firm growth. Using 64,086 director biographies from Standard & Poor’s 1500 firms, this study finds that MEBM positively impacts firm-level revenue growth and that this relationship is strengthened or weakened by important contingencies that occur in the firm. The findings suggest that the common practice of not including experienced marketers on boards of directors puts firms at a competitive disadvantage.
... Thus, NPPAs are another tool that marketing managers can employ to enrich the information set available about new products and increase the credibility of their marketing signals. Finally, we think that these findings can help not only managers but also key stakeholders like security analysts serving as information intermediaries between firms and investors (e.g., Chakravarty and Grewal 2016) to understand the long-term performance of a firm based on the stock market's reaction to the firm's behavior. ...
Substantial research has examined how stock market reactions to marketing actions affect subsequent marketing decisions. However, prior research provides limited insights into whether abnormal stock returns to a marketing action actually predict the future performance resulting from that action. This study focuses on new product preannouncements (NPPAs) and investigates the relationship between short-term stock market returns to an NPPA and the post-launch new product performance under various industry and firm conditions. Findings based on a dynamic panel data analysis of 208 NPPAs in the U.S. automotive industry between 2001 and 2014 reveal that stock returns associated with an NPPA are not an appropriate forward-looking measure of future product performance. However, under specific conditions (i.e., when the preannouncement is specific, the preannounced new product has low innovativeness, the preannouncing firm has a high reputation and invests heavily in advertising, and the preannouncement environment is less competitive), abnormal stock returns to NPPAs actually predict the future performance of new products. Thus, this study extends the marketing–finance and innovation literature with its focus on the conditions that affect the predictive power of immediate stock returns for the future performance of new products.
Strategic emphasis is a critical decision reflecting a firm's relative proclivity toward value creation versus value appropriation. Despite the increasing role of the board in setting the strategic priorities of firms, there is a dearth of research examining board‐level influences on strategic emphasis. Drawing on the cognitive perspective of corporate governance, we posit that exposure to external information via board interlocks provides competing incentives to pursue value creation and value appropriation strategies. We hypothesize that political ideological diversity among directors facilitates the utilization of external information for novel purposes, thus increasing firms' value creation focus. Combining data on directors' political ideologies with network analysis, we test these hypotheses in 584 large U.S. firms between 2000 and 2018. We find that political ideological diversity influences strategic emphasis both directly and in interaction with board interlock network centrality: politically ideological diverse boards exhibit a greater focus on value creation, and this effect is strengthened when the board is well connected to others. These results have implications for the director selection process, and for executives advocating for value creation strategies and the requisite R&D investments under differing conditions of board composition and information exposure.
Prior
literature does not provide a clear prediction of how executive confidence affects the degree to which a firm engages in “myopic marketing management,” the tendency to decrease current marketing spending to mitigate any potential earnings shortfall. We propose that highly confident CEOs are more likely to cut marketing spending to raise current earnings numbers because they believe in their ability to generate high future firm earnings that can cover the long-term losses arising from their current short-term actions. The effect is heightened when the board of directors is more independent and monitors more, but attenuated if CMOs are more confident and thus are better able to convince their CEOs and boards of directors to support continued investments in marketing. The moderating impact of CMO confidence is proposed to be stronger as the CMO becomes more powerful. Using secondary data from a broad cross-section of firms, we provide robust empirical support for our model. Our results highlight situations in which CMOs need to be wary of cuts to their marketing budget, and also provide a potential mechanism through which marketers can protect their budget in the presence of highly confident CEOs—through their own confidence levels.
The marketing literature shows the necessity of an increased disclosure of marketing metrics. However, very few studies have examined its importance from a reverse lens—the result of withdrawing disclosure is scant. This study provides a new perspective by examining whether and when the withdrawal of marketing metrics affects the shareholder value of a focal firm. We center on one voluntarily disclosed marketing metric: monthly comparable store sales (CSS) in the retail industry. We conduct an event study to analyze the monthly CSS cessation announcements of 94 chain retailers. The empirical results show that withdrawal events do not necessarily decrease retailers’ abnormal returns. The decrease or increase in abnormal returns depends on external and internal factors. Retailers facing lower industry competition and higher forecast errors experience lower abnormal returns. However, those with less diversified customer bases, better retailing outcomes, and fewer intangible resources experience higher abnormal returns for withdrawal decisions.
To defeat myopic brand management, we need to understand better what motivates executives to invest in brand building. Drawing from agency theory, we argue that a better alignment of executivesʻ and shareholdersʻ interests can help. Tests using longitudinal compensation data of chief executive officers (CEO) from 123 public firms suggest that decreasing the sensitivity of CEOʻs Equity-Based Compensation (EBC) to the firmʻs stock price and increasing its sensitivity to the firmʻs stock return volatility are associated with higher brand equity. Weak governance somewhat offsets these effects. Moreover, we find that the impact of EBC on brand equity is partially mediated through the firmʻs strategic emphasis. Our research highlights the importance of understanding managerial incentives as drivers of brand equity.
This study centers on the roles of marketing and operations capabilities in preventing future recalls. Whereas prior literature identifies operations capability as critical for recall prevention, the current research highlights the equivalent importance of marketing capability. Furthermore, rather than limiting marketing’s role to damage control efforts after a recall, this study identifies its potential for preventing future recall incidents. With research conducted in the consumer packaged goods industry, the authors determine that firms that improve their marketing and operations capabilities after a recall lower their likelihood of future recalls. A proposed motivation‐based model for post‐recall marketing and operations capability improvement predicts that recalling public firms, by default, do not invest in capability improvements. The test of the propositions, with a sample of 276 product recalls using joint estimation, reveals that stock market penalties for recalls, combined with analyst following and independent boards, push recalling firms to make capability improvements. However, well‐reputed firms and those whose competitors recently engaged in recalls push back against investors’ demands.
This study details the mechanisms on how CEO regulatory focus affects the salience of the gains versus losses involved in myopic marketing decision-making, and how such CEO psychological attributes interact with internal equity-based compensation, external pressure from equity analysts, and environmental turbulence to affect firms’ myopic marketing management propensities. We find that when faced with short-term earnings pressure to meet earnings expectations and when time is no longer a resource, predominantly promotion-focused are more likely to engage in myopic marketing management to benefit from the temporary stock price increase, which comes from meeting or beating earnings expectations. Conversely, predominantly prevention-focused CEOs are less prone to such short-termist actions which results in long-term value loss. For the moderating variables, we find that: (1) equity-based compensation tends to attenuate myopic marketing tendencies of promotion-focused CEOs but have no impact on prevention-focused CEOs, (2) whether equity analysts improve monitoring or aggravate short-term earnings pressure depends on the CEO’s regulatory focus, and (3) environmental turbulence does not increase the myopic marketing management tendencies of predominantly promotion-focused CEOs but rather intensifies the relunctance of prevention-focused CEOs to take short-termist actions. We further find that myopic marketing management mediates the impact of CEO regulatory focus on future firm performance. These findings have important implications for firms and boards when selecting new CEOs and structuring the compensation of existing CEOs. Firms need to simultaneously consider the fit between the CEOs’ regulatory focus, firms’ needs, the business environment, as well as CEO compensation structure.
This study investigates how performance feedback––the discrepancy between aspiration and actual performance––relates to firms’ relative strategic emphasis on value-creation (VC) versus value-appropriation (VA). With a sample of 7460 firm-year observations collected from 1558 publicly-listed Chinese companies during 2011–2017, we find that negative performance feedback boosts firms’ relative strategic emphasis on VC versus VA, while positive performance feedback has an inverted U-shaped effect. Explicitly, a low to medium level of positive performance feedback increases firms’ relative emphasis on VC, while a medium to high level of positive feedback decreases it. We find that two monitoring mechanisms—board independence and media coverage—moderate these influences. Specifically, board independence weakens the boosting effect of negative performance feedback and strengthens the inverted U-shaped effect of positive performance feedback; media coverage strengthens the boosting effect of negative performance feedback and weakens the inverted U-shaped effect of positive performance feedback.
Public corporations often appoint external former founders to their boards in hopes that these will encourage a (re‐)focus on creating future new business. Seeking to investigate this common practice, we integrate upper echelons theory with imprinting theory, arguing that founding a company indeed represents a formative experience that will leave an imprint on founders and their subsequent board decision‐making. Subsequent to their founding experience, however, some founders may be subjected to likewise formative but public corporate experiences, for instance, by taking their own business public or by assuming CEO positions in other corporations, that will lead to a decay of the original founding imprint and its effect. We find support for our reasoning across corporate boards in S&P1500 firms ranging from 2000 to 2012.
The current research, leveraging the upper echelons' theory, examines the association between CEO narcissism and firms' myopic management. The study further examines the underlying mediating effect of market orientation in this linkage. Finally, the study examines the moderating effect of the output-oriented board of directors on the indirect effect of CEO narcissism on myopic management, i.e., a moderated-mediation analysis. Data on a sample of 210 Indian firms from 2009 to 2016 suggest that CEO narcissism positively influences the firm's myopic management. Furthermore, market orientation partially mediates the influence of CEO narcissism on myopic management, such that CEO narcissism lowers market orientation. The lesser the market orientation more is myopic management. However, as the output orientation of the board of directors increases, the indirect positive effect of narcissism on myopic management is decreased. Our study shines a light on the antecedents of myopic management and its role as a mediator under the contingency effect of demographics of the board of directors, i.e., the marketing board of directors.
This article examines the cyclical behavior of business (firm-financed) R&D expenditure at the national level, using a panel of 64 countries spanning about 4 decades. R&D is considerably more volatile than GDP and tends to be procyclical. We adopt the Hofstede framework to investigate systematically cross-national heterogeneity in comovement and volatility of R&D. Similar to prior studies, a higher R&D intensity (R&D expenditure / GDP) is associated with more uncertainty accepting, long-term oriented, and indulgent countries. Notably, R&D behaves less procyclically in more uncertainty accepting, individualistic, long-term oriented, and indulgent countries, and it is less volatile in more masculine, individualistic, long-term oriented, and indulgent countries. That is, a culture with a higher propensity to invest in R&D tends to follow business cycles less closely (i.e., lower comovement) and have more persistent spending over time (i.e., lower volatility). Furthermore, higher comovement or volatility of R&D indeed harms national productivity and innovativeness. Therefore, this research broadens our understanding of the role national culture plays by demonstrating (1) that it affects considerably the cyclical behavior of R&D and (2) that this cyclical behavior is another conduit through which culture influences economic performance.
Conceptualized as a meta‐construct, operations‐related structural flux (ORSF) refers to appointments and exits—voluntary or involuntary—of operations‐related executives, to and from the firm. This research leverages the contingency theory perspective to show that ORSF’s influence on firm performance is contingent on contextual circumstances of such executive changes, specifically, appointments and exits—voluntary or involuntary. Examining executive turnover data from North American public firms between 2000 and 2016, the authors find that the firm‐level context of operations executives’ turnover is consequential for firm performance. On average, operations appointments are adaptive, but operations exits, including those due to both voluntary and involuntary reasons, disrupt firm performance. However, parallel effects are not evident for marketing‐ and finance‐related appointments and exits. Furthermore, our study reveals that exit of one operations executive hurts firm performance (measured in terms of Tobin’s q) by 3.3%. A post‐hoc analysis finds that firm performance of the sample firms that witness involuntary operations‐related exits is, on average, 9.2% lower than that of the sample firms that do not witness involuntary operations‐related exits. These results indicate the outsized influence of operations‐related executives, who collectively are generally responsible for much of a firm’s budget, workforce, resources, structures, and capabilities.
Purpose
This study aims to answer two unique related questions on the overarching relationship between a CEO’s personal religious affiliation, the firm’s advertising spending decision and its shareholder value. First, does the CEO’s religious affiliation, a proxy for risk taking, influence the firm’s advertising spending decision? Second, does the advertising spending decision mediate the relationship between the CEO’s religious affiliation and the firm’s shareholder value?
Design/methodology/approach
This study uses data on the religious affiliations of CEOs of publicly listed US firms, 1992–2014, from Marquis Who’s Who; advertising spending and shareholder value from Compustat, and panel data-based regression models including CEO characteristics from ExecuComp, and firm-, industry- and time-based controls.
Findings
We find higher advertising spending levels for Protestant over Catholic-led firms, and advertising spending mediates the relationship between a CEO’s religious affiliation and the firm’s shareholder value.
Research limitations/implications
Marketing theory needs to incorporate the missing but fundamental effect of the CEO’s religious affiliation-based values on decisions and outcomes.
Practical implications
Boards of Directors may need to align the CEO’s and their firm’s spending goals.
Originality/value
While previous studies focused on the influence of religious affiliation on consumers’ attitudes and behavior, and executives’ financial and R&D spending decisions, this study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, is the first to investigate the effect of a CEO’s religious affiliation on the firm’s advertising spending decision and its shareholder value.
As firms use advertising to gain product market advantages and increase their valuation in financial markets, disclosing their advertising spending is influential—whether it erodes organizational competitive advantages in product markets or signals quality in financial markets. The authors argue that firms learn from peers’ decisions to reduce the uncertainty in their own advertising disclosure, and they empirically investigate information-based organizational herding in the context of advertising spending disclosure, where a 1994 reporting rule made advertising spending disclosures voluntary in the United States. The authors examine whether a firm relies on information from benchmark leaders or similar peers to resolve disclosure uncertainty. A novel identification strategy, which uses partially overlapping strategic groups, to mitigate simultaneity and correlated unobservables, shows robust evidence for herding effects among peer firms in the same strategic group. Moreover, firms are more likely to resolve disclosure uncertainty from similar peers rather than from benchmark leaders. The authors discuss how firms can use knowledge of competitors’ predicted advertising disclosure decisions conditional on their disclosure to their strategic advantage in product and financial markets.
We study how CEOs use of social media interacts with myopic management motives. Observation of a sample of 252 CEO using Twitter reveals that myopic managers increase their daily frequency of tweets and replies while curbing R&D and advertising expenses to meet short-term earnings requirements. Our findings also show that CEOs engaging in myopic management increase their activity on social media to moderate its negative effect on stock market returns. These findings add to the strategic leadership literature, pointing at managers’ use of social media as a tool to back general management decisions’ and deal with subsequent stock markets reactions.
Organizations often follow organizational routines to allocate resources to various strategic ends, such as marketing. However, managers may need to allocate unplanned resources to strategies when addressing performance concerns. Drawing on the behavioral theory of the firm, this study extends the existing literature by specifically investigating how performance feedback, including both historical performance and social performance, influences a firm’s unplanned marketing investment. Using panel data on 421 S&P 500 companies, the analysis shows that both historical performance and social performance affect a firm’s marketing investment, but in different ways. Specifically, performance falling below historical aspiration can directly result in increased marketing investment that cannot be explained by organizational routines alone. In comparison, social performance has an indirect impact. When social performance interacts with historical performance to generate inconsistent performance feedback, it may encourage managers to become more willing to invest in marketing. This effect is more prominent when a firm (1) receives more favorable stock recommendations from financial analysts, (2) has more slack resources, or (3) faces more intense competition.
We explore how institutional shareholder attention affects firms’ decisions to cut R&D expenses. Prior studies consider the attention distraction of institutional investors as a signal of firms’ loosened monitoring constraints. Consistent with this view, we find that firms with distracted shareholders are more likely to engage in short-term behavior, namely, cutting R&D expenses. We further find that this effect is concentrated in firms with low information asymmetry, few product market competitive threats, few financial constraints, and low CEO ability. Our results suggest that attention is a key resource for institutional shareholders to effectively monitor firms and, hence, reduce managerial myopia.
Firms sometimes engage in myopic management (e.g., cutting marketing spending, providing lenient credit to customers to improve short-term results). Although marketing is at the center of such myopic management, there are few insights on whether a marketing department could prevent it. To address this gap, the authors examine the role of powerful marketing departments in preventing myopic marketing spending and revenue management. They hypothesize that there are internal and external enablers of marketing department power (i.e., a chief executive officer with marketing experience, the firm’s power over its customers, analyst coverage, and institutional stock ownership) that help a powerful marketing department prevent myopic management. They test the hypotheses using a panel of 781 publicly listed U.S. firms between 2000 and 2015. As hypothesized, when the firm has (1) a chief executive officer with a marketing background and (2) power over its customers, increasing marketing department power decreases the likelihood of both myopic marketing spending and myopic revenue management; increasing marketing department power and analyst coverage decreases the likelihood of myopic marketing spending. The findings highlight powerful marketing leadership as a hitherto overlooked way to prevent myopic management and improve firm performance.
Scholars have expressed concern that marketing's influence at the strategic levels of the firm is waning. Consistent with this view, only 2.6% of firms' board members have marketing experience. The authors suggest that this is shortsighted and that including more marketing-experienced board members (MEBMs) will increase firm growth by (1) helping firms prioritize growth as a strategic objective and (2) contributing their expertise to improve the effectiveness of revenue growth strategies. Drawing on the behavioral model of corporate governance, the authors develop a theoretical framework explicating the situational, dispositional, and structural influence moderators that alter the impact ofMEBMs on firm growth. Using 64,086 director biographies from S&P 1500 firms, the authors find thatMEBMs positively affect firm-level revenue growth and that this relationship is strengthened or weakened by important contingencies that occur in the firm. The findings suggest that the common practice of not including experienced marketers on boards of directors puts firms at a competitive disadvantage.
A firm’s strategic emphasis on value creation versus appropriation, which is typically reflected in its resource allocation between R&D and advertising, is a central corporate decision that significantly influences financial performance. However, the drivers of such decisions remain underexplored. This study identifies a significant predictor of strategic emphasis, namely, corporate managerial hubris, and reveals some of its boundary conditions. Leveraging a unique dataset based on text mining of press releases issued by over 400 firms across 13 years, the authors demonstrate that high corporate managerial hubris predicts low strategic emphasis on advertising relative to R&D. However, this effect is mitigated significantly by firm maturity, corporate governance, and industry-level strategic emphasis. The results provide novel insights into the effects of hubris on firm spending, the situations wherein marketing decisions tend to be subject to managers’ psychological bias, the means of preventing over- or under-investment in marketing strategy, and the recruitment and training of managers.
Despite the clearly visible effects of analysts’ pressures on C-level executives in the popular press, there is limited evidence on their effects on marketing spending decisions. This study asks two questions. First, how do analysts’ pressures affect firms’ short-term marketing spending decisions? Based on a sample of 2706 firms during 1987–2009 compiled from Institutional Brokers Earning System, COMPUSTAT, and CRSP databases we find that firms cut marketing spending. Second, more importantly, we ask if firms which remained more committed in the past to marketing spending under analysts’ pressures have higher longer-term stock market performance. We find that the stock market performance of firms more committed to marketing spending under past periods of analysts’ pressures is higher. The findings are replicated for R&D spending and are robust across measures, controls, and methodologies. Consideration of two industry-based moderators, R&D spending and revenue growth, and one firm-based moderator, whether the firm is among the industry’s top four market share or other lower share firms, reveals that the findings are stronger for high R&D and growth industries and lower market share firms. One key implication is that top executives respond to analysts’ pressures by cutting marketing spending in the short term; however, if they can resist these pressures, longer-term stock market performance is higher.
Most large firms operating in consumer markets own and market more than one brand (i.e., they have a brand portfolio). Although firms make corporate-level strategic decisions regarding their brand portfolio, little is known about whether and how a firm's brand portfolio strategy is linked to its business performance. Using data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index and other secondary sources, the authors examine the impact of the scope, competition, and positioning characteristics of brand portfolios on the marketing and financial performance of 72 large publicly traded firms operating in consumer markets over ten years (from 1994 to 2003). Controlling for several industry and firm characteristics, the authors analyze the relationship between five specific brand portfolio characteristics (number of brands owned, number of segments in which they are marketed, degree to which the brands in the firm's portfolio compete with one another, and consumer perceptions of the quality and price of the brands in the firm's portfolio) and firms’ marketing effectiveness (consumer loyalty and market share), marketing efficiency (ratio of advertising spending to sales and ratio of selling, general, and administrative expenses to sales), and financial performance (Tobin's q, cash flow, and cash flow variability). They find that each of these five brand portfolio characteristics explains significant variance in five or more of the seven aspects of firms’ marketing and financial performance examined.
This study examines the effect of pressure felt by management to meet or beat analysts' earnings forecasts on firms' behavior in oligopolistic output competition. We argue that firms under such earnings pressure strive to increase current profits by exploiting market power opportunities and tightening output, even though these acts could encourage rival output expansion. Using data from the U.S. electricity generation industry, we found that firms facing earnings pressure tended to restrict output in markets in which market structure and competitor characteristics were favorable for the exercise of market power, but their competitors tended to increase output in those markets.
Firms’ spending on R&D, advertising, and inventory holding affect firm performance, which in turn affects future spending in each of these three areas. Effective allocation of resources across R&D, advertising, and inventory holding is challenging since an understanding of their dynamic inter-relationships is necessary. Past research has not examined these spending issues simultaneously. We estimate inter-relationships among the effects of firms’ R&D spending, advertising spending, and inventory holding on sales and firm value (as measured by its Tobin’s Q) using a vector auto regression model of a panel of publicly listed U.S. high technology manufacturing firms. Insights from the computation of long-term effects indicate that advertising spending and inventory holding increase sales, while R&D spending does not, and advertising and R&D spending increase firm value, while inventory holding does not. In addition, firm spending in all three functions is positively affected by sales but negatively by firm value. We discuss the implications of the study for marketing literature and managerial practice.
We argue in this study that a resolution of the ambiguity and conflict surrounding executive compensation and corporate control practices requires a more unified perspective on top management compensation, ownership, and corporate governance. Drawing from agency and organizational research, the study develops and tests a contingency perspective on how organizations seek to ensure appropriate managerial behavior through a balancing of trade-offs between incentive, monitoring, and risk-bearing arrangements. We suggest that (1) the ability of firms to use executive compensation contracts to address managerial incentive problems is hampered by risk-bearing concerns that stem from the risk aversion of top managers, (2) this problem is particularly severe for riskier firms, and (3) firms seek to address this problem by structuring their boards of directors to ensure sufficient monitoring of managerial behavior, given the magnitude of the agency problem. This contingency perspective is then tested using a large sample of initial public offering firms. The findings and their implications for the debates about ownership and control and executive pay for performance are discussed.
We sample CEOs of the 2005 S&P 500 corporations to look at the relationship between experience in the CEO position of a different firm and the post-succession financial performance of the firm that they currently lead. We find that experience in the CEO position is negatively related to firm performance. CEOs who directly move to their current CEO position from the previous one and those with job-specific experience in the same or related industry or at the helm of a previous company similar in size to the current one are associated with significantly lower post-succession performance than those without prior CEO experience. The results contribute to the literatures on CEO succession, the performance effect of job-specific experience, and the transferability of human capital. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Does owner management necessarily eliminate the agency costs of ownership? Drawing on agency literature and on the economic theory of the household, we argue that private ownership and owner management expose privately held, owner-managed firms to agency threats ignored by Jensen's and Meckling's (1976) agency model. Private ownership and owner management not only reduce the effectiveness of external control mechanisms, they also expose firms to a "self-control" problem created by incentives that cause owners to take actions which "harm themselves as well as those around them" (Jensen 1994, p. 43). Thus, shareholders have incentive to invest resources in curbing both managerialand owner opportunism. We extend this thesis to the domain of the family firm. After developing hypotheses which describe how family dynamics and, specifically, altruism, exacerbate agency problems experienced by these privately held, owner-managed firms, we use data obtained from a large-scale survey of family businesses to field test our hypotheses and find evidence which suggests support for our proposed theory. Finally, we discuss the implications of our theory for research on family and other types of privately held, owner-managed firms.
This article examines the association between stock returns and earnings changes of firms that have made different tradeoffs with respect to R&D and advertising spending during an economic downturn. During the 2000–2002 bear market that was associated with a downturn in the U.S. economy, we find the coefficient that relates stock returns and earnings changes to be significantly greater for firms that increased their advertising expenditures and decreased their R&D expenditures than for firms that increased their R&D expenditures and decreased their advertising expenditures. Our results suggest that investors perceive that an increased emphasis on advertising can enable firms to stem earnings erosion that can potentially occur during an economic downturn.
We investigate whether the positive associations between discretionary accrual proxies and beating earnings benchmarks hold for comparisons of groups segregated at other points in the distributions of earnings, earnings changes, and analysts-based unexpected earnings. We refer to these points as "pseudo" targets. Results suggest that the positive association between discretionary accruals and beating the profit benchmark extends to pseudo targets throughout the earnings distribution. We find similar results for the earnings change distribution. In contrast, we find few positive associations between discretionary accruals and beating pseudo targets derived from analysts-based unexpected earnings. We develop an additional analysis that accounts for the systematic association between discretionary accruals and earnings and earnings changes. Results suggest that the positive association between discretionary accruals and earnings intensifies around the actual profit benchmark (i.e., where earnings management incentives may be more pronounced). We find similar effects around the actual earnings increase benchmark. However, analogous patterns exist for cash flows around the profit and earnings increase benchmarks. In sum, we are unable to eliminate other plausible explanations for the associations between discretionary accruals and beating the profit and earnings increase benchmarks.
Firms exhibit or "manifest" three types of branding strategies: Corporate Branding, House of Brands or Mixed Branding. These strategies differ in their essential structure as well as their potential costs and benefits to the firm. Prior research has failed to understand how these branding strategies are related to the intangible value of the firm. This relationship is investigated using five-year data for a sample of 113 U.S. firms; Corporate Branding strategy is found to be associated with higher values of Tobin's q while Mixed Branding strategy is associated with lower values of Tobin's q, after controlling for the effects of several important and relevant factors. The relationships of the control variables are consistent with prior expectations. Also, a large majority of the firms would have been able to improve their Tobin's q had they adopted a branding strategy different than the one manifested by their brand portfolios. The implications and future research directions are discussed.
Academics and managers are confronted with reconciling the social and economic aspects of business-to-business exchanges.
In a service context, the authors investigate the relative importance of contractual and relational governance on exchange
performance and the influence of the boundary spanner on the implementation of these governance mechanisms and on exchange
performance. They test a model of the governance of commercial banking exchanges using interview data with both parties to
the exchange (the account manager as the bank’s boundary spanner and the business client). Relational governance is the predominant
governance mechanism associated with exchange performance. Contractual governance is also positively associated to exchange
performance, but to a much lesser extent. The closeness of the account manager to the client company in terms of information
gathering is also positively associated to exchange performance. However, this is mediated through both contractual and relational
governance mechanisms with relational governance being the stronger mechanism.
This article examines the effects of monitoring on interfirm relationships. Whereas some research suggests that monitoring can serve as a control mechanism that reduces exchange partner opportunism, there is also evidence showing that monitoring can actually promote such behavior. The authors propose that the actual effect of monitoring depends on (1) the form of monitoring used (output versus behavior) and (2) the context in which monitoring takes place. With regard to the form of monitoring, the results from a longitudinal field study of buyer-supplier relationships show that output monitoring decreases partner opportunism, as transaction cost and agency theory predict, whereas behavior monitoring, which is a more obtrusive form of control, increases partner opportunism. With regard to the context, the authors find that informal relationship elements in the form of microlevel social contracts serve as buffers that both enhance the effects of output monitoring and permit behavior monitoring to suppress opportunism in the first place.
This study examines the effect of the readability of firm written communication on the behavior of sell-side financial analysts. Using a measure of the readability of corporate 10-K filings, we document that analyst following, the amount of effort incurred to generate their reports, and the informativeness of their reports are greater for firms with less readable 10-Ks. Additionally, we find that less readable 10-Ks are associated with greater dispersion, lower accuracy, and greater overall uncertainty in analyst earnings forecasts. Overall, our results are consistent with the prediction of an increasing demand for analyst services for firms with less readable communication and a greater collective effort by analysts for firms with less readable disclosures. Our results contribute to the understanding of the role of analysts as information intermediaries for investors and the effect of the complexity of written financial communication on the usefulness of this information.
Studies in the capital market context indicate that earnings changes and earnings levels considered jointly provide a more comprehensive representation of unexpected earnings than either earnings changes or earnings levels considered alone. Recent studies of executive compensation demonstrate that executive compensation revisions are greater when earnings innovations are permanent, than when innovations are transitory. Together, these literatures imply that both earnings changes and earnings levels explain revisions to CEO compensation. Specifically, formal analysis implies that weights on earnings changes vary directly with the persistence of earnings innovations and that weights on earnings levels vary directly with persistence for low persistence observations and inversely with persistence for high persistence observations. Evidence for compensation to 712 executives of U.S. corporations is consistent with these expectations. Such results suggest that earnings levels, earnings changes, and earnings persistence need to be considered when investigating relations between accounting earnings and executive compensation.
This article examines the role of marketing in the context of initial public offerings (IPOs), a neglected issue in the extant literature. The results from a large-scale, cross-industry study indicate that firms’ pre-IPO marketing spendings help reduce IPO underpricing and boost IPO trading in the stock market. The econometric models also suggest that these effects are heterogeneous; that is, they are more salient for firms with higher cost reduction efficiency and in markets with a smaller number of historical IPOs. With regard to theory, this research ushers in a greenfield of IPOs, helping build more powerful theories of market-based assets and customer equity. With regard to practice, it builds the case for not cutting marketing before an IPO. Prudent investors may be better able to pick “star” IPOs if they can track pre-IPO marketing spendings and model firm cost reduction efficiency simultaneously. Overall, this article offers fresh implications for the marketing–finance interface, uncovering brand-new IPO-based reasons that marketing can help create shareholder value.
Marketing executives are being urged to speak in the language of finance to gain internal support for marketing initiatives. Responding to this call, the authors examine the impact of a firm's advertising and its research and development (R&D) on the systematic risk of its stock, a key metric for publicly listed firms. They hypothesize that a firm's advertising and R&D expenditures create intangible assets that insulate it from stock market changes, lowering its systematic risk. They test the hypotheses using a panel data on 644 publicly listed firms between 1979 and 2001, consisting of five-year moving windows. They scale the firm's advertising and R&D expenditures by its sales. After controlling for factors that accounting and finance researchers have shown to be associated with systematic risk, the authors find that advertising/sales and R&D/sales lower a firm's systematic risk. The article's findings extend prior research that has focused primarily on the effect of marketing initiatives on performance metrics without consideration of systematic risk. For practice, the ability of advertising and R&D to reduce systematic risk highlights the multifaceted implications of advertising and research programs. The article's findings may surprise senior management, some of whom are skeptical of the financial accountability of advertising programs.
The authors examine the long-term effects of promotion and advertising on consumers’ brand choice behavior. They use 8 1/4 years of panel data for a frequently purchased packaged good to address two questions: (1) Do consumers’ responses to marketing mix variables, such as price, change over a long period of time? (2) If yes, are these changes associated with changes in manufacturers’ advertising and retailers’ promotional policies? Using these results, the authors draw implications for manufacturers’ pricing, advertising, and promotion policies. The authors use a two-stage approach, which permits them to assess the medium-term (quarterly) effects of advertising and promotion as well as their long-term (i.e., over an infinite horizon) effects. Their results are consistent with the hypotheses that consumers become more price and promotion sensitive over time because of reduced advertising and increased promotions.
The authors develop a conceptual framework of the marketing–finance interface and discuss its implications for the theory and practice of marketing. The framework proposes that marketing is concerned with the task of developing and managing market-based assets, or assets that arise from the commingling of the firm with entities in its external environment. Examples of market-based assets include customer relationships, channel relationships, and partner relationships. Market-based assets, in turn, increase shareholder value by accelerating and enhancing cash flows, lowering the volatility and vulnerability of cash flows, and increasing the residual value of cash flows.
Using stock price reactions to sudden deaths of top executives as a measure of expected contribution to shareholder value, we examine the relationship between executive pay and managerial contribution to shareholder value. We find, first, that the managerial labor market is characterized by positive sorting: managers with high perceived contributions to shareholder value obtain higher pay. The executive pay-contribution relationship is stronger for professional executives and for executives with high compensation. We estimate, second, that an average top executive (chief executive officer) appears to retain 71% (65%) of the marginal rent from the firm-manager relationship. We examine, third, how the executive pay-contribution relationship varies with individual, firm, and industry characteristics. Overall, our results are informative for the ongoing discussion about the level of executive compensation.
We find that institutional ownership concentration is positively related to the pay-for-performance sensitivity of executive compensation and negatively related to the level of compensation, even after controlling for firm size, industry, investment opportunities, and performance. These results suggest that the institutions serve a monitoring role in mitigating the agency problem between shareholders and managers. Additionally, we find that clientele effects exist among institutions for firms with certain compensation structures, suggesting that institutions also influence compensation structures through their preferences.
Using unique data on brokerage-firm trading, I examine whether analysts' earnings forecasts and stock recommendations affect their brokerage firms' share of trading in the forecast stocks. I find that individual analyst's forecasts that differ from the consensus forecast generate significant brokerage-firm trading in the forecast stocks in the two weeks after the forecast release date, affirming that analysts' forecasts affect their brokers' commission revenue. However, I find no evidence that analysts' forecast errors-the difference between forecast earnings and actual earnings-increase brokerage-firm trading. This result suggests that analysts cannot generate trade for their employers simply by adding error to their forecasts. I find that buy recommendations generate relatively more trading, both buying and selling, through the analyst's brokerage firm. Collectively, these results suggest that analysts can generate higher trading commissions through their positive stock recommendations than by biasing their forecasts.
This article proposes a model of the dynamics of the CEO's tenure in office. The central argument is that there are discernible phases, or seasons, within an executive's tenure in a position, and that these seasons give rise to distinct patterns of executive attention, behavior, and, ultimately, organizational performance. The five delineated seasons are (a) response to mandate, (b) experimentation, (c) selection of an enduring theme, (d) convergence, and (e) dysfunction. The theoretical and practical implications of the model are discussed.
Executive Overview
Critics of U.S. corporate governance claim that public company (a) CEOs are overpaid, (b) CEOs are not paid for performance, and (c) boards do a poor job of compensating and monitoring CEOs. In this paper, I argue that the critics are wrong. While corporate governance and CEO pay are not perfect, a great deal of evidence suggests that CEO pay is largely determined by market forces. CEOs have been affected by the same forces that have increased income inequality. They have not done better than several similar groups. (In fact, average CEO pay declined in real terms from 2000 to 2006.) CEOs are strongly paid for performance. And boards do monitor CEOs. CEO tenures are lower than they have been since tenures began to be measured in the 1970s; CEO turnover is more closely tied to stock performance than it has been since turnover began to be studied in the 1970s. Increased transparency for CEO pay (required by the SEC), increased shareholder activism, and the increased prevalence of majority voting in director elections should further reduce any remaining unwise compensation practices. More regulation, such as the proposed “Say on Pay” bill to mandate a shareholder vote on executive compensation, is likely to impose costs with little additional benefit.
This study investigates the influence of analyst forecast dispersion on Ohlson's (2001) proposed linear information dynamics where consensus analyst forecasts are suggested as a proxy for other information. Our results indicate that Ohlson's proposed valuation model is most descriptive of market pricing when forecast dispersion, and hence information asymmetry, is high. Our results also suggest that when analysts are confronted with high information asymmetry, they tend to focus less on accounting fundamentals and rely more on other nonaccounting information, thus decreasing the correlation between the explanatory power of analyst forecasts and that of earnings and book value.
Early research found little relationship between CEO pay and firm performance. Therefore, recent work on CEOs' compensation has focused less on the substantive nature of the job performed by such executives and more on the social and political context in which their pay is set. This study returns attention to the substantive nature of CEOs' jobs. Specifically, we argue that CEOs are paid for the level of information processing that their jobs require. Results from four industries support this view: chief executive compensation was higher in firms whose diversification strategy, approach to technology, and top management team structure placed particularly high information-processing demands on their CEOs.
We study CEOs with a career background in finance. Firms with financial expert CEOs hold less cash, more debt, and engage in more share repurchases. Financial expert CEOs are more financially sophisticated: they are less likely to use one companywide discount rate instead of a project-specific one, they manage financial policies more actively, and their firm investments are less sensitive to cash flows. Financial expert CEOs are able to raise external funds even when credit conditions are tight, and they were more responsive to the dividend and capital gains tax cuts in 2003. Analyzing CEO-firm matching based on financial experience, we find that financial expert CEOs tend to be hired by more mature firms. Our results are consistent with employment histories of CEOs being relevant for corporate policies. However, we cannot formally rule out that our findings are partly explained by endogenous CEO-firm matching.
Using models drawn from organizational theory and institutional economics, this paper examines the extent to which firms borrow money. We argue that corporate borrowing depends on four factors: the expected return on borrowing, the availability of internal funds, the strategic orientation of the chief executive officer, and the firm's board composition. We formulate four hypotheses, which we test with data on 22 large U.S. manufacturing firms from 1956 through 1983. Retained earnings, the expected return on borrowing, the presence of a representative of a financial institution on the firm's board of directors, and the presence of a CEO from a finance background are all associated with the level of borrowing. The findings suggest that both economic and organizational factors affect the extent to which firms borrow.
This paper conducts an empirical investigation of the relationship between information asymmetry and earnings management predicted by Dye (1988) and Trueman and Titman (1988). When information asymmetry is high, stakeholders do not have sufficient resources, incentives, or access to relevant information to monitor manager’s actions, which gives rise to the practice of earnings management (Schipper, 1989; Warfield et al., 1995). Empirical results suggest a systematic relationship between the magnitude of information asymmetry and the level of earnings management in two different settings.
This study examines analyst forecast errors within the context of stock recommendations. We predict positive forecast error (i.e., optimism) for buy recommendations and negative forecast error (i.e., pessimism) for sell recommendations. We offer two explanations for this prediction: (1) the unconscious tendency to process information in a manner that supports one’s goal, which we refer to as the “objectivity illusion” hypothesis, and (2) the economic incentive to boost trade, which we refer to as the “trade boosting” hypothesis. The pattern of analyst forecast bias we predict (i.e., optimism for buys and pessimism for sells) is opposite in direction to that predicted by the management relations hypothesis—a commonly cited hypothesis for analyst forecast bias.
We find broker‐analyst earnings forecast errors are significantly optimistic for buy recommendations and significantly pessimistic for sell recommendations, consistent with the objectivity illusion and trade boosting hypotheses. Our study indicates that the pattern of results reported in prior research (i.e., increasingly optimistic earnings forecasts as the stock recommendation becomes less favorable) is likely driven by a correlated omitted variable, actual earnings. Results of an analysis to distinguish between trade boosting and objectivity illusion appear more consistent with the objectivity illusion.
We show that pay is higher for chief executive officers (CEOs) with general managerial skills gathered during lifetime work experience. We use CEOs' résumés of Standard and Poor's 1,500 firms from 1993 through 2007 to construct an index of general skills that are transferable across firms and industries. We estimate an annual pay premium for generalist CEOs (those with an index value above the median) of 19% relative to specialist CEOs, which represents nearly a million dollars per year. This relation is robust to the inclusion of firm- and CEO-level controls, including fixed effects. CEO pay increases the most when firms externally hire a new CEO and switch from a specialist to a generalist CEO. Furthermore, the pay premium is higher when CEOs are hired to perform complex tasks such as restructurings and acquisitions. Our findings provide direct evidence of the increased importance of general managerial skills over firm-specific human capital in the market for CEOs in the last decades.
We develop a method for simultaneously estimating the cost of equity capital and the growth in residual earnings that are implied by current stock prices, current book value of equity, and short-term forecasts of accounting earnings. We demonstrate the use of our method by calculating the expected equity risk premium. Our estimate is higher than estimates in extant studies that are based on the same earnings forecast data. The main difference between our study and these papers is that while they provide arguments supporting an assumed rate of growth beyond the forecast horizon, we estimate this rate.
In January 2002, Donald R. Lehmann, Executive Director of the Marketing Science Institute, submitted a proposal for a JM Special Section, “Linking Marketing to Financial Performance and Firm Value.” The proposal included activities to promote interactions among marketing academics and practitioners, designed to advance research on this topic. I was excited about the opportunity to stimulate and publish new research, and after extensive discussions, the American Marketing Association and the Marketing Science Institute formally agreed to cosponsor the Special Section. Authors submitted their manuscripts through a paper competition as well as directly through JM. Donald R. Lehmann, the Consulting Editor, and a panel of distinguished scholars reviewed every submission. The panel included Tim Ambler, Gregory S. Carpenter, Robert Jacobson, V. Kumar, Roland T. Rust, and Rajendra K. Srivastava. All submissions underwent JM’s standard double-blind review process under my editorship, and members of JM’s E...
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Prior to Regulation Fair Disclosure ("Reg FD"), some management privately guided analyst earnings estimates, often through detailed reviews of analysts' earnings models. In this paper I use proprietary survey data from the National Investor Relations Institute to identify firms that reviewed analysts' earnings models prior to Reg FD and those that did not. Under the maintained assumption that firms conducting reviews guided analysts' earnings forecasts, I document firm characteristics associated with the decision to provide private earnings guidance. Then I document the characteristics of "guided" versus "unguided" analyst earnings forecasts. Findings demonstrate an association between several firm characteristics and guidance practices: managers are more likely to review analyst earnings models when the firm's stock is highly followed by analysts and largely held by institutions, when the firm's market-to-book ratio is high, and its earnings are important to valuation but hard to predict because its business is complex. A comparison of guided and unguided quarterly forecasts indicates that guided analyst estimates are more accurate, but also more frequently pessimistic. An examination of analysts' annual earnings forecasts over the fiscal year does not distinguish between guidance and no-guidance firms; both experience a "walk-down" in annual estimates. To distinguish between guidance and no-guidance firms, one must examine quarterly earnings news: unguided analysts walk down their annual estimates when the majority of the quarterly earnings news is negative; guided analysts walk down their annual estimates even though the majority of the quarterly earnings news is positive.
Marketers and investors face a heated, provocative debate over whether excelling in social responsibility initiatives hurts or benefits firms financially. This study develops a theoretical framework that predicts (1) the impact of corporate social performance (CSP) on firm-idiosyncratic risk and (2) the role of two strategic marketing levers, advertising and research and development (R&D), in explaining the variability of this impact among different firms. The results show that higher CSP lowers undesirable firm-idiosyncratic risk. Notably, although the salutary impact of CSP is greater in firms with higher (versus lower) advertising, a simultaneous pursuit for CSP, advertising, and R&D is harmful with increased firm-idiosyncratic risk. For theory, the authors advance the literature on the marketing-finance interface by drawing attention to the risk-reduction potential of CSP and by shedding new light on some critical but neglected roles of strategic marketing levers. They also extend CSP research by moving away from the long-fought battle for a universal CSP impact and toward a finer-grained understanding of when some firms derive more risk-reduction benefits from CSP. For practice, the results indicate that the “goodwill refund” of CSP is not unconditional. They also empower marketers to communicate more effectively with investors (i.e., doing good to better manage the risk surrounding firm stock prices).
There is a growing recognition that innovation speed is important to a firm's creating and sustaining competitive advantage amidst rapidly changing business environrients. However, there has been little theoretical advancement or model building regarding when innovation speed is appropriate, what factors speed up innovations, and how differences in speed affect project outcomes. In this article, we organize and integrate the innovation speed literature, develop a conceptual framework of innovation speed, and offer researchable propositions relating to the need for and antecedents and outcomes of innovation speed. Specifically, we argue that innovation speed (a) is most appropriate in environments characterized by competitive intensity, technological and market dynamism, and low regulatory restrictiveness; (b) can be positively or negatively affected by strategic-orientation factors and organizational-capability factors; and (c) has an influence on development costs, product quality, and ultimately project success.
This article is intended to enhance the position of stakeholder theory as an integrating theme for the business and society field. It offers an instrumental theory of stakeholder management based on a synthesis of the stakeholder concept, economic theory, behavioral science, and ethics. The core theory-that a subset of ethical principles (trust, trustworthiness, and cooperativeness) can result in significant com- petitive advantage-is supplemented by nine research propositions along with some research and policy implications. Even before Preston (1975) issued an intellectual call-to-arms, schol- ars in the field of inquiry called business and society sought a paradigm or an integrating framework for topics thought to be central to the disci- pline. Various models-corporate social performance, social control of business, and stakeholder-have been advanced as part of this search. This article attempts to advance the case for using the stakeholder model as an integrating theme for the field by proposing a formal instrumental theory of stakeholder management. The theory represents a synthesis of the stakeholder concept, economic theory, insights from behavioral sci- ence, and ethics. The argument begins with a brief history of the search for a paradigm in the business and society field followed by a discussion of the stakeholder model as theory. Assumptions that underlie the theory are then offered along with discussions of the nature of contracting, effi- cient contracting, and the role of ethics in efficient contracting. An argu- ment is presented for corporate morality as an analog to individual mo- rality. At this point, the instrumental stakeholder theory is formally presented, followed by several research propositions. Implications and extensions of the theory and a brief conclusion complete the article. THE QUEST FOR A BUSINESS AND SOCIETY PARADIGM Although the business and society field has had at least a nominal presence at numerous business schools for over two decades and has experienced considerable growth since then in terms of faculty member- ship in academic organizations and numbers of outlets for scholarly ar-
Agency theory is an important, yet controversial, theory. This paper reviews agency theory, its contributions to organization theory, and the extant empirical work and develops testable propositions. The conclusions are that agency theory (a) offers unique insight into in- formation systems, outcome uncertainty, incentives, and risk and (b) is an empirically valid perspective, particularly when coupled with complementary perspectives. The principal recommendation is to in- corporate an agency perspective in studies of the many problems having a cooperative structure. One day Deng Xiaoping decided to take his grandson to visit Mao. "Call me granduncle," Mao offered warmly. "Oh, I certainly couldn't do that, Chairman Mao," the awe-struck child replied. "Why don't you give him an apple?" suggested Deng. No sooner had Mao done so than the boy happily chirped, "Oh thank you, Granduncle." "You see," said Deng, "what in- centives can achieve." ("Capitalism," 1984, p. 62)
You need not look further than the morning newspaper or evening news to observe the tremendous influence of CEO reputations on shareholder value. Whether it is through a stock transaction, a response to a crisis, or the creation of a best-in-the-industry talent pool, a CEO's reputation plays a significant role in determining how both internal and external audiences evaluate — and ultimately respond to — a company. This article will discuss the greater impact of CEO reputation, in light of the increased expectations of stakeholders, the proliferation of communication channels, and the demand for a broader content of messages that CEOs are delivering to their constituencies. Combined, these factors are expanding the role of today's CEO as we know it, making CEO reputation an even more critical ingredient to a company's success.Corporate Reputation Review (2000) 3, 366-370; doi:10.1057/palgrave.crr.1540127
Based on 134 CEO succession events in nondiversified, manufacturing firms, this study examines the relationships between industry structure and the characteristics of CEO successors. The paper also explores the performance implications of the fit between industry structure and CEO successors. Results indicate that industry structure plays an important, but not pervasive, role in explaining variations in newly selected CEOs. Specifically, the higher the level of industry product differentiation, the lower the organizational tenure, the higher the educational level and the greater the likelihood of a nonthroughput background in the CEO successor; the higher the industry growth rate, the lower the organizational tenure and age of the CEO successor. However, findings provide very limited support for the normative view that firms which match CEO successor characteristics to industry structure realize better postsuccession performance than those with lower levels of fit. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This study shows that financial analysts of brokerage firms that provide investment banking services to a company (investment banker analysts) are optimistic, relative to other (noninvestment banker) analysts, in their earnings forecasts and investment recommendations. Returns earned by following the investment recommendations of investment banker analysts, however, are not significantly different from those of non-investment banker analysts. Given that information regarding the investment banking relationships of brokerage firms is publicly available, we find evidence that capital market participants rely relatively less on the investment banker analysts in forming their earnings expectations. Although we find a significant capital market reaction around the noninvestment banker analysts' research report dates and not around the investment banker analysts' research report dates, the difference between the two market reactions is not statistically significant. Finally, we find that investment banker analysts' earnings forecasts are, on average, as accurate as those of noninvestment banker analysts.
This paper examines the association between patterns of increasing earnings and incremental firm value as reflected by earnings multiples, holding level of income constant. As predicted, we find firms exhibiting patterns of increasing earnings have larger earnings multiples than other firms and the incremental earnings multiple is reduced significantly when an increasing earnings pattern is broken. The findings are robust to controlling for growth, risk, earnings variability, measurement error in permanent earnings, persistence, dividend yield, and industry membership, using proxies identified in previous research. An extension of the Lang [1991] model indicates increasing earnings patterns can affect firm valuation by permitting market participants to update their prior beliefs about the firm. We conclude earnings patterns are a proxy for value-relevant firm characteristics such as growth that are not reflected fully in proxies identified in prior research.
This paper investigates the relation between analyst characteristics (number of analysts following a firm and their forecast dispersion) and market liquidity characteristics (bid-ask spreads and depths and the adverse-selection component of the spread). Prior research has found contradictory results on the relation between analyst following and market liquidity and has offered differing theories on how analysts affect liquidity. While prior research has posited analysts as proxies for privately informed trade or as signals of information asymmetry, I hypothesize that analysts provide public information, implying that analyst following (forecast dispersion) should have a positive (negative) association with liquidity. Cross-sectional simultaneous estimations provide support for this hypothesis. The results are both statistically significant and economically important. Granger-causality tests indicate that analyst characteristics lead market liquidity characteristics. These results clarify the role of analysts in providing information to financial markets and highlight benefits of increased analyst following.
In this paper we investigate how incentives affect managers’ input resource expenditure decisions and how firms make equity grant decisions considering managerial behavior. Focusing on selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expenditure, we first document that SG&A expenditure creates future value that varies across firms and industries. We hypothesize and find that new equity incentives lead to an increase in SG&A expenditure in companies where SG&A creates a high future value. The extent to which long-term incentives impact managers’ expenditure decisions depends on the future value it creates. We also find that firms with high level of SG&A spending grant more new equity incentives when SG&A creates more future value. The evidence is consistent both with managers making rational investment decisions in response to new equity incentives and with firms making efficient grant decisions based on managers’ expected behavior. Overall, this study documents the importance of considering the future value created by input resource expenditure in examining the association between equity incentives and managerial spending behavior.
Recent reports in the business press allege that managers take actions to avoid negative earnings surprises. I hypothesize that certain firm characteristics are associated with greater incentives to avoid negative surprises. I find that firms with higher transient institutional ownership, greater reliance on implicit claims with their stakeholders, and higher value-relevance of earnings are more likely to meet or exceed expectations at the earnings announcement.
I also examine whether firms manage earnings upward or guide analysts' forecasts downward to avoid missing expectations at the earnings announcement. I examine the relation between firm characteristics and the probability (conditional on meeting analysts' expectations) of having (1) positive abnormal accruals, and (2) forecasts that are lower than expected (using a model of prior earnings changes). Overall, the results suggest that both mechanisms play a role in avoiding negative earnings surprises.
Standard principal-agent models commonly invoked to explain executive pay practices do not account for the involvement of third-party intermediaries in the CEO labor market. This paper investigates the influence of one such intermediary – talent agents who seek out prospective employers and negotiate pay packages on behalf of CEOs. Jensen, Murphy and Wruck (2004) characterize the hiring of such agents as an obvious example of rent extraction by incoming CEOs. After controlling for economic factors, proxies for governance quality, and determinants of the CEO’s reservation wage, the first year compensation of CEOs who use these agents is significantly higher by about $10 million relative to the pay of CEOs who do not use such agents. Further analysis suggests that firms run by CEOs who use talent agents report superior future operating and stock performance, suggesting that these CEOs are not extracting rents at the expense of shareholders.
This paper examines the consequences of real activities manipulation. Using financial statement data, I identify firms that appear to engage in any of the following real activities manipulation (RM): reducing R&D to increase income, reducing SG&A to increase income, timing of income recognition from the disposal of long-lived assets and investments, and cutting prices to boost sales in the current period and/or overproducing to decrease COGS expense. I then examine whether RM is associated with firms just meeting two earnings benchmarks (zero and last year’s earnings). The results indicate that real activities manipulation of R&D, SG&A, and production are positively associated with firms just meeting these earnings benchmarks. Next, I examine the extent to which real activities manipulation affects subsequent performance. A negative association between just meeting earnings benchmarks by using RM and subsequent performance supports prior research suggesting managers opportunistically use earnings management to the detriment of shareholders (i.e., managerial opportunism). A positive association is consistent with managers using operational discretion to attain benefits that allow better future performance or to signal future firm value. I find that firm-years reflecting RM to just meet earnings benchmarks have higher subsequent firm performance (compared to firm-years that do not engage in RM and miss or just meet the earnings benchmarks). In this setting, using RM to influence the output of the accounting system is not opportunistic, but consistent with managers attaining benefits that allow better future performance or signaling.