Theory argues that career concerns (i.e., concerns about the impact of current performance on contemporaneous and future compensation) encourage managers to withhold bad news disclosure. However, empirical evidence regarding the extent to which a manager's career concerns are associated with a delay in bad news disclosure is limited. Across multiple proxies for career concerns, we find that the extent to which managers delay bad news is positively associated with their level of career concerns. Then, we hand-collect data on a compensation contract that firms use to reduce CEOs' career concerns (i.e., ex ante severance pay agreements). We find that if managers receive a sufficiently large payment in the event of dismissal, they no longer delay the disclosure of bad news. Overall, our findings support prior theoretical evidence that managers delay bad news disclosure due to career concerns and suggest a mechanism through which firms can mitigate the delay. JEL Classifications: M12; M41. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

Although the results from our study suggest phytanic acid levels may be associated with prostate cancer risk, they were based on a study with a small sample size. Much larger studies are required to confirm these important findings.

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We document the interrelationship of disclosure policy decisions among firms by providing evidence that the cessation of quarterly management forecast guidance by 656 firms (“stoppers”) during 2004–2009 is associated with a pursuant increase in quarterly forecasts by previously non-forecasting firms in the same industries (“free-riders”). Increased forecasting by free-riders is positively associated with the information loss in the industry (proxied by the number of stoppers in the industry, the strength of previously existing information transfer relations between stoppers and free-riders, and whether stoppers and free-riders are peer firms) and the importance of the information loss to the free-riders (proxied by analyst following and the existence of new share issues). Following the cessation event, free-riders' cost of capital decreases as a function of the extent to which free-riders immediately initiate quarterly forecasting. JEL Classifications: M41. Data Availability: Data are available from the sources indicated in the text.

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