DescriptionThis dissertation consists of three papers. In the first paper we identify a new incentive for managers in determining management forecast (MF) characteristics stemming from the relative performance evaluation feature of CEO promotion tournaments. We document higher credibility of MF for firms with stronger tournament incentives (as proxied for by the CEO pay gap). We posit that the relative performance evaluation feature of CEO promotion tournaments creates mutual monitoring mechanism within the management team as well as the incentives for lower-ranked executives to provide high quality information to gain better evaluation results. We thereby extend previous MF literature that focuses mainly on equity-based incentives and reports mixed findings. Our results are robust to using different tournament measures, controlling for other known determinants of MF characteristics as well as manager skills, and corrections of endogeneity of all specifications. In the second paper, we investigate the spill-over effect of customer fraud on non-fraudulent suppliers’ investment decisions. We posit that suppliers utilize customers’ information to infer future demand and economic prospects, and noisy information distorts and misguides the investment and productions decisions made by suppliers. The overinvestment and misrepresented performance of customers signal a high demand and prosperous economic prospects for suppliers, resulting in overinvestment decisions by suppliers. We find that suppliers invest more during the fraud periods of customers. The degree of distortion is less severe when the supplier operates in concentrated industry and more severe when suppliers have higher sales volatility. In addition, we show that the overinvestments by suppliers are inefficient as associated future cash flows are significantly reduced. Our results are robust to different fraud samples, alternative research methodology, and controlling for other known determinants of investment decisions. In the third paper, we investigate whether firms engaging in corporate fraud take advantages of strategic timing of earnings announcements (EA). We document that misreporting firms strategically time their EA in low attention periods (i.e. after trading hours) during violation years. In addition, we show that the timing strategy is followed by a longer detection period and more insider trading. We thereby extend previous corporate disclosure timing literature that mainly focuses on the content of reported news. We also extend the corporate fraud literature by showing a low-cost way in which firms can possibly “hide” the manipulated earnings. Our results are robust to different samples of fraud, different research methodology, different sample periods, and controlling for other known determinants of market attention.