We extend the research on how CEOs address career concerns during their early tenure in firms and we argue that CEOs use a forecast precision strategy to highlight or obfuscate information in a way that may help them convey favorable signals on their abilities. Our findings show that new CEOs are more likely to increase forecast precision when the underlying forecast news is better to highlight positive signals and they will obfuscate more negative news by lowering forecast precision to moderate investors’ negative reaction. Additionally, our results show that CEOs especially use this approach when firms are headquartered in the states that have stricter enforceability of non-compete clauses. We also find that the association between forecast precision and forecast news is stronger when institutional monitoring is weak, CEOs are young, and/or hired from outside the firm. Our main findings remain unchanged when only quarterly forecasts are used in the analyses and are robust to different early tenure cutoffs.

我们扩展了关于 CEO 在公司早期任职期间如何解决职业问题的研究，我们认为 CEO 使用预测精确策略来突出或混淆信息，以帮助他们传达有关其能力的有利信号。我们的研究结果表明，当潜在的预测新闻更好地突出积极信号时，新任 CEO 更有可能提高预测精度，并且他们会通过降低预测精度以缓和投资者的负面反应来混淆更多的负面新闻。此外，我们的结果表明，当公司总部位于非竞争条款具有更严格可执行性的州时，CEO 尤其会使用这种方法。我们还发现，当机构监控薄弱、CEO 年轻时，预测精度与预测新闻之间的关联性更强。和/或从公司外部雇用。当分析中仅使用季度预测时，我们的主要发现保持不变，并且对不同的早期任期截止日期是稳健的。