SPEAKING & ADVISORY

Corporate Financial Reporting and Firm Fundamentals

How conservative are corporate financial reports and how should conservatism be measured, what are the roles of accruals in financial reporting, and does financial reporting quality enhance investment efficiency? My research shows that widely used measures of conditional conservatism are confounded by scale-related regularities in earnings and return variance, which motivated an analytical framework for identifying conservatism in accounting data. I apply the same lens to identify the distinct roles of accruals in corporate financial reporting and to show that the widely reported link between reporting quality and investment efficiency is an artifact of the estimation approach. Across these questions, the emphasis is on construct validity and placebo testing as tools for identifying the real effects of financial reporting choices. My current work asks whether the assets behind the AI infrastructure buildout are priced to last as long as they are built to last. 

Corporate Sustainability Reporting and Sustainable Finance

What is the link between ESG scores and stock outperformance, how should investors compare carbon performance across sector peers, and how much of corporate exposure to future carbon costs is priced? My research on ESG alpha shows that ESG scores do not change in a vacuum, underscoring the need to disentangle causation from correlation before attributing outperformance to ESG. In carbon accounting and valuation, my work shows how investors can use carbon data to make meaningful sector peer comparisons and build carbon-efficient portfolios, develops the corporate carbon overhang metric as the present value of a firm's expected carbon costs under evolving carbon pricing, and solves for the carbon premium in the cost of capital that would internalize what carbon pricing leaves unpriced. This line of work also examines the capital market implications of emissions disclosure mandates, showing how full-scope emissions disclosure under California's Senate Bill 253 could reshape how investors evaluate carbon performance and allocate capital across sector peers. This work both informs and is informed by my role as Co-Faculty Director of the Sustainable & Impact Finance Initiative.

Alternative Data, Arbitrage, and Price Discovery

What is the role of arbitrageurs, short-sales constraints, and ownership structure in information processing and the efficacy of the price discovery process? My evidence underscores the role of short sellers as an important group of capital market participants that can impact the speed of price adjustment to news, especially in speculative market settings: the combination of valuation uncertainty and short-sales constraints generates significant mispricing in the IPO aftermarket, and negative activism by short sellers who uncover corporate fraud serves as an important mechanism for private information revelation. Related work identifies the relaxation of arbitrage constraints as a mechanism through which stock indexing can facilitate information arbitrage and increase price efficiency. A second strand examines the implications of investor attention and accounting expertise for the pricing of mandated DCF disclosures, and shows that unequal access to alternative data—such as satellite imagery available only to sophisticated investors—can increase information asymmetry among market participants. My award-winning MBA course, Financial Data Analysis and Valuation, has been a source of inspiration in this area. 

Macroaccounting and Market-Level Valuation

What is the real-time macro content of corporate financial reports, and how does the stock market value news about economic growth? My research shows that aggregate accounting earnings lead GDP growth, and professional forecasters underuse them; that financial statement analysis of the 100 largest firms takes the pulse of the economy cost-effectively; and that the weekly flow of corporate reports sharpens the dynamic factor models used for nowcasting, especially early in the quarter. On the valuation side, the apparent disconnect between returns and GDP surprises reflects offsetting cash flow and discount rate news; forecast walk-downs arise from asymmetric forecasting difficulty even without strategic bias; and apparent conservatism in the national accounts is an artifact of return variance. The work was recognized with the AAA/AICPA Notable Contributions to Accounting Literature Award and has drawn interest from economists and policymakers. Building on this work, I serve as a regular panelist on the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's Survey of Professional Forecasters.

Corporate Law and Governance

What is the link between litigation risk and corporate governance, what did the JOBS Act do to IPO pricing and investor protection, and what is "good" corporate governance and who gets to decide? My research shows that the link between universal demand laws and management entrenchment is driven by a handful of firms whose governance changes predate the laws, calling into question the literature that uses these laws for identification. The JOBS Act's apparent increase in IPO underpricing reflects market conditions; issuers using its disclosure reliefs raised capital at higher multiples and were more likely to destroy long-term shareholder value. And "synthetic governance" shows that bespoke index funds can offer a market-based way to settle contested governance questions such as dual-class structures. My work here draws on collaborations through the Berkeley Center for Law & Business, where I serve as a Core Faculty Fellow, and on my doctoral seminar, Capital Markets Research in Accounting and Law, offered jointly with Berkeley Law. 

Supply Chain Links and Firm-Level Valuation

What are the implications of customer-base concentration for supplier firm performance, stock market valuation, inventory management, and audit pricing and quality? Prior research emphasized the downside of major-customer dependency—the concentration risk a supplier bears when a few customers account for most of its sales, and the bargaining power that lets those customers squeeze supplier margins. My work identifies a second channel: the operating efficiencies that flow from close supplier–customer relationships, which build over the length of the relationship and trade off against the concentration risk. These efficiencies show up across the supplier's operations—in SG&A and other operating savings, in inventory held for less time with fewer write-downs, in greater investment in R&D, and in assurance. Recognized with the AAA/AICPA Notable Contributions to Accounting Literature Award, the work brought the operations side of interfirm relationships into capital markets research and launched a literature at the intersection of accounting, finance, and operations.