IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ajf/louvlr/2020003.html

Managerial career concerns and the content of corporate disclosures: An analysis of the tone of earnings press releases

Author

Listed:
  • Arslan-Ayaydin, Özgür
  • Bishara, Norman
  • Thewissen, James
  • Torsin, Wouter

Abstract

This study examines how the narrative content of corporate disclosures is affected by managers’ career concerns, measured by the enforceability of noncompete provisions in employment contracts. We provide empirical evidence that career concerns lead managers to manipulate the content of corporate disclosures by inflating the tone of earnings press releases to convey a more optimistic picture about the firm’s financial performance. We ensure the causality of our findings by exploiting changes to noncompete enforceability following court rulings. We also show that tone inflation is stronger when CEOs are younger, less capable and less experienced, as well as for managers of firms with more independent boards, more analysts following and better governance.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Arslan-Ayaydin, Özgür & Bishara, Norman & Thewissen, James & Torsin, Wouter, 2020. "Managerial career concerns and the content of corporate disclosures: An analysis of the tone of earnings press releases," LIDAM Reprints LFIN 2020003, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain Finance (LFIN).
    • Handle: RePEc:ajf:louvlr:2020003
    Note: In : International Review of Financial Analysis, Vol. 72, no. 101598 (2020)
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Yang, Yongliang & Zhang, Jitao & Song, Changting & Wu, Yingying & Zhang, Bingbing, 2025. "Does environmental information disclosure make financial markets more informative? Evidence from China," Journal of Contemporary Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 21(2).
    2. Mbanyele, William & Huang, Hongyun, 2024. "Staggered boards, agency costs and stock price crash risk: Evidence from China," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 71(C).
    3. Mounia Boulhaga & Abdelfettah Bouri & Hany Elbardan, 2022. "The effect of internal control quality on real and accrual-based earnings management: evidence from France," Journal of Management Control: Zeitschrift für Planung und Unternehmenssteuerung, Springer, vol. 33(4), pages 545-567, December.
    4. Chen, Jean Jinghan & Song, Peiyang & Loi, Fai Lim, 2024. "Strategic forward-looking nonearnings disclosure and overinvestment," The British Accounting Review, Elsevier, vol. 56(6).
    5. Yue, Shuai & Anderson, Hamish D. & Liao, Jing, 2024. "Negative information hoarding in politically connected firms: The influence from the central environmental protection inspections," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    6. Wang, Wenjiao & Sun, Ziyuan & Wang, Lan, 2025. "Does ESG rating divergence exacerbate management tone manipulation? − Empirical evidence based on MD&A text," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 197(C).
    7. Özgür, Arslan-Ayaydin & Thewissen, James & Torsin, Wouter, 2021. "Earnings Management Methods and CEO Political Affiliation," LIDAM Discussion Papers LFIN 2021017, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain Finance (LFIN).
    8. Samya Tahir & Mian Sajid Nazir & Muhammad Ali Jibran Qamar & M. Martin Boyer, 2022. "Ineffective implementation of corporate governance? A call for greater transparency to reduce agency cost," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(5), pages 1528-1547, July.
    9. Miao Jiang & Bo Zhu & Luxi Li, 2024. "Manager‐specific manipulation of tone and stock price synchronicity," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 64(4), pages 3803-3821, December.
    10. Azam Pouryousof & Farzaneh Nassirzadeh & Davood Askarany, 2023. "Inconsistency in Managers’ Disclosure Tone: The Signalling Perspective," Risks, MDPI, vol. 11(12), pages 1-14, November.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ajf:louvlr:2020003. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Séverine De Visscher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lfuclbe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.