Paul Fischer

University of Pennsylvania | UP · The Wharton School

We consider a cheap‐talk setting with two senders and a continuum of receivers with heterogenous preferences. Each receiver is constrained to listen to one of the senders but can choose which sender to listen to. The introduction of a second sender facilitates more informative communication and even enables full communication for a large set of sen...

In addition to being a function of traditional fundamentals such as cash-flow persistence and the discount rate, the equilibrium association between a security price and a value-relevant statistic can simply be a function of what rational investors believe the association will be. We refer to this phenomenon as beliefs-driven price association (BPA...

In addition to being a function of traditional fundamentals such as cash-flow persistence and the discount rate, the equilibrium association between a security price and a value-relevant statistic can simply be a function of what rational investors believe the association will be. We refer to this phenomenon as beliefs-driven price association (BPA...

The literature in economics and finance document that asset bubbles can emerge and remain sustained for a variety of reasons. In this paper, we develop an analytical model to characterize two types of rational bubbles linked to accounting disclosures, drift bubbles and sensitivity bubbles. We conjecture that both types of bubbles are likely to do s...

Qualitative disclosure accompanying an earnings release is incrementally informative to earnings news (i.e., it is an information substitute for earnings) and it reflects the information content of earnings news (i.e., it is an information complement to earnings). When management provides quantitative guidance, the role of qualitative disclosure as...

We decompose quantitative management earnings forecasts into macroeconomic and firm-specific components to determine the extent to which voluntary disclosure provided by management has macroeconomic information content. We provide evidence that the forecasts of bellwether firms, which are defined as firms in which macroeconomic news explains the gr...

I analyze an agency model in which the CFO oversees a reporting system that provides information useful for monitoring, decision-making, and contracting. The CFO can bias the performance metric, but this biasing choice is subject to pressure from the potentially powerful CEO. In this setting, I …nd that CEO power over the CFO leads to lower-quality...

We assess how forms of disagreement among investors affect a firm's cost of capital. Firms experience a lower cost of capital if investors perceive that other investors are ignoring relevant disclosures (perceived errors of omission), but a higher cost of capital if investors perceive that others are responding to irrelevant disclosures (perceived...

We examine a communication game between an analyst and a decisionmaker and investigate how the presence of public information affects the precision of the information the analyst gathers and communicates to the decision-maker. We characterize conditions under which public information causes the analyst to underinvest or overinvest in the informatio...

This paper provides evidence that uncontested director elections provide informative polls of investor perceptions regarding board performance. We find that higher (lower) vote approval is associated with lower (higher) stock price reactions to subsequent announcements of management turnovers. In addition, firms with low vote approval are more like...

In a setting with perfect competition and dutiful voting behavior, we assess whether a shareholder voting mechanism maximizes share price when investors disagree about the course of action a firm should pursue. In general, there does not a one-share, one-vote shareholder-voting rule that induces the price- maximizing choice for any distribution of...

This paper provides evidence that uncontested director elections provide informative polls of investor perceptions regarding board performance. We find that higher (lower) vote approval is associated with lower (higher) stock price reactions to subsequent announcements of management turnovers. In addition, firms with low vote approval are more like...

We analyze the effect of external financing concerns on managers' financial reporting behavior prior to management buyouts (MBOs). Prior studies hypothesize that managers intending to undertake an MBO have an incentive to manage earnings downward to reduce the purchase price. We hypothesize that managers also face a conflicting reporting incentive...

We examine a communication game between an analyst and a decision-maker and investigate how the presence of public information affects the preci-sion of the information the analyst gathers and credibly communicates to the decision-maker. We characterize conditions under which public information causes the analyst to under-invest or over-invest in t...

Research in sociology and ethics suggests that individuals adhere to social norms of behavior established by their peers. Within an agency framework, we model endogenous social norms by assuming that each agent’s cost of implementing an action depends on the social norm for that action, defined to be the average level of that action chosen by the a...

ABSTRACT There is growing interest in the use of markets within firms. Proponents have noted that markets are a simple and efficient mechanism for allocating resources in economies in which information is dispersed. In contrast to the use of markets in the broader economy, the efficiency of an "internal market" is determined in large part by the "e...

Markets have a remarkable capacity for producing efficient resource allocations when information about relative values is dispersed across economic agents. We explore the use of market mechanisms inside the firm to address a resource allocation problem, and compare the outcome with the first- and second-best solution. Although the market mechanism...

We suggest that transparent bias in management disclosures may result from managers processing information in a heuristic, as distinct from Bayesian, fashion when they face imperfect or head-to-head competition. We predict that transparent bias in disclosures is positively related to the extent of head-to-head competition. In addition, when disclos...

This paper considers how the presence of a speculative investor, who bets on a firm's future earnings report, affects how the firm's management manipulates that report. We examine the influence of the speculator's information on earnings management behavior, quality of reported earnings, and stock price efficiency. We also provide predictions for,...

This paper considers variations of a strategic communication game between an expert and a decision-maker where the decision-maker can gather information from the expert and also from other information sources before taking an action that affects the interests of both players. In one variation, both the expert and the decision-maker publicly observe...

This paper analyzes a communication game between a sender and receiver with misaligned incentives. Because of the misalignment, in equilibrium, the sender's privately observed information is not perfectly communicated. We study the relation between the quality of the sender's information and the quality of the information communicated. We establish...

This paper examines the relationship between product architecture, supply-chain performance metrics, and supply-chain efficiency. We model the contracting relationship between a supplier and a buyer. The supplier is privately informed about the outcome of his design/production investment. The buyer both appraises the supplier's component and does f...

This article analyzes the relation between product quality, the cost of quality, and the information that can be contracted upon. We consider a setting where a risk neutral supplier sells an intermediate product to a risk neutral buyer. The supplier incurs prevention costs to reduce the probability of selling a defective product, and the buyer incu...

We present a simple model of managerial reporting bias for a setting in which the capital market is uncertain about the manager's reporting objective. In this setting, the manager's reporting bias reduces the value relevance of the manager's report; that is, it adds noise to the report. Through comparative static results, our model yields insights...

This paper examines the interaction between an analyst's disclosure and a manager's earnings report. We show how the nature of the analyst's information affects the quality of reported earnings. We also provide conditions for the analyst's disclosure to reduce the quality of investor information in total (i.e., from all sources). Finally, we offer...

We characterize the steady-state equilibrium in which informed traders who exhibit heuristic (i.e., representativeness, as opposed to Bayesian) and Bayesian behaviors achieve the same expected utility. Then, we show how the endogenous, steady-state proportion of heuristic traders is affected by the quality of public information and other exogenous...

We analyze a principal-agent model in which the principal (e.g., shareholders) and the agent (e.g., an employee) can personally trade securities tied to the outcome of an uncontrollable event affecting output. The model is employed to address two questions. First, under what conditions does compensation risk management at the individual level subst...

A conventional assumption in economic models is that expert judgement requires Bayesian behavior. A justification for this assumption is that because Bayesian behavior results in superior decisions, it is dominant in a evolutionary sense. Bayesian experts who are sequentially rational, however, set standards that are "too low". Consequently, heuris...

In this paper we study the bias a manager introduces into reports of firm performance when the market is uncertain about the manager's objectives. Comparative static results suggest that the information content of the manager's report falls as the cost of biasing reports falls, or uncertainty about the manager's objective increases. As an extension...

Using a sample of announcements drawn from the 1980s and early 1990s, we reassess the relation between earnings news and earnings announcement timing. Using analyst forecast errors to proxy for news, we find that early announcements are associated with good news relative to late announcements. The relation between news and timing, however, does not...

We formalize the effects of an earnings disclosure on security prices under an assumption of limited liability. We derive various nonlinear relations between equity prices and earnings under a variety of capital structure assumptions and. if possible, we tie the relations attained to results from the existing empirical literature. We also character...

We consider the design of contracts in a principal-agent setting with two agents where each agent privately observes and reports to the principal a signal regarding the actions taken. We consider two cases: one where the agents observe the same signal and one where the agents observe different signals. For each case we show that, under certain cond...

We employ an overlapping generations model of a …nancial market to demonstrate that, in equilibrium, investors can become skittish in that they appear to overreact to earnings news during some stretches of time. In an equilibrium with investor skittishness, price deviates from steady state equilibrium price and can be highly volatile relative to a...