About

Ilan Guttman is a Professor of Accounting at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business, where he joined in July 2013. He holds the position of The Peter Drucker Faculty Fellow and teaches courses at both the graduate and doctoral levels. He is also the director of the accounting PhD program. Professor Guttman's primary research interest lies in the application of economics of information in capital market settings. His recent research focuses on disclosure decisions by information holders such as managers and financial analysts, and the market reactions to these disclosures. His work explores issues including the manipulation of disclosures when disclosure is mandatory or voluntary, the impact of earnings manipulation on managers' contracts, the relationship between disclosure and real economic decisions like investment and dividend policies, and the implications of dynamic multi-period settings on disclosure and earnings management. His research has been published in leading academic journals including The Accounting Review, The American Economic Review, the Review of Financial Studies, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Accounting Research, and Management Science. Prior to his tenure at NYU Stern, he served on the faculty of Stanford Graduate School of Business, teaching MBA and PhD courses. Professor Guttman earned his B.A. in Economics, B.Sc. in Computer Science, M.A. in Economics and Business Administration, and Ph.D. in Economics, all from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he also taught microeconomics, finance, and macroeconomics.

Research topics

• Business
• Finance
• Economics
• Microeconomics
• Accounting
• Actuarial science
• Monetary economics

Selected publications

• Dynamic Voluntary Disclosure and Investment Efficiency

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Sequential Reporting Bias

  The Accounting Review · 2024-04-10 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT Firms with correlated fundamentals often issue reports sequentially, leading to information spillovers. The theoretical literature has investigated multifirm reporting, but only when firms report simultaneously. We examine the implications of sequential reporting, where firms aim to maximize their market price and can manipulate their reports. The introduction of sequentiality significantly alters the biasing behavior of firms and the resulting informational environment relative to simultaneous reporting. In particular, a lead firm always manipulates more when reports are issued sequentially. Moreover, relative to simultaneous reporting, sequential reporting reduces the overall information available to the market about each firm, resulting in less efficient and less volatile prices. Additionally, we find that stronger correlation in firm fundamentals can amplify the lead firm’s incentive for manipulation under sequentiality, in contrast to simultaneous reporting. We offer further results regarding, for example, market response coefficients, and provide a number of empirical implications. JEL Classifications: C72; D82; D83; G14; M41.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Going Dark: Incentives for Private Firms’ Strategic Nondisclosure

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Cancel Culture and Social Learning

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Strategic Timing of IPOs and Disclosure: A Dynamic Model of Multiple Firms

  The Accounting Review · 2020 · 13 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Monetary economics
  • Economics

  ABSTRACT We study a dynamic timing game between multiple firms, who decide when to go public in the presence of possible information externalities. A firm's IPO pricing is a function of its privately observed idiosyncratic type and the level of investor sentiment, which follows a stochastic, mean-reverting process. Firms may wish to delay their IPOs in order to observe the market reception of the offerings of their peers. We characterize the unique symmetric threshold equilibrium, whereby pioneer firms with high idiosyncratic types endogenously emerge. The results provide novel implications regarding variation in IPO timing, sequential clustering, IPO droughts, the composition of new issues over time, and how IPO volume fluctuates over time. These include, among others, that in more populated industries, a lower proportion of firms emerge as industry pioneers, but follower IPO volume is intensified. Additionally, heightened uncertainty over investor sentiment exacerbates delay and leads to lower IPO volume.

  PublisherDOI

• Sequential Reporting Bias

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The effect of exogenous information on voluntary disclosure and market quality

  Journal of Financial Economics · 2020 · 78 citations

  • Business
  • Accounting
  • Finance
  PublisherDOI

• The Effect of Voluntary Disclosure on Investment Inefficiency

  The Accounting Review · 2020 · 44 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Business
  • Finance
  • Actuarial science

  ABSTRACT We introduce real decisions (a project choice decision, an investment scale decision, and an information acquisition decision) to the Dye (1985) voluntary disclosure framework and examine how the prospect of voluntary disclosure affects managers' real decisions. Riskier projects lead to more volatile environment and hence entail higher efficiency loss at the subsequent investment scale decision stage if managers are uninformed. If managers are informed, they can withhold bad information, and the value of this option is higher for riskier projects. We show that the voluntary nature of managers' disclosure may lead to two types of inefficiencies: (1) managers may choose riskier projects, which generate lower expected cash flow due to the higher efficiency loss at the subsequent decision stage, and (2) managers may over-invest in information acquisition, because informed managers with bad information have the option to pool with uninformed managers and benefit from being overpriced.

  PublisherDOI

• Strategic Timing of IPOs and Disclosure: A Dynamic Model of Multiple Firms

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2020-01-01 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Earnings Management and Earnings Quality: Theory and Evidence

  The Accounting Review · 2018-09-01 · 154 citations

  article

  ABSTRACT We study a model of earnings management and provide predictions about the time-series properties of earnings quality and reporting bias. We estimate the model to empirically separate two components of investor uncertainty: fundamental economic uncertainty, and information asymmetry between the manager and investors due to reporting noise. We find that (1) the null hypothesis of zero reporting bias is rejected; (2) the ratio of the variance of the noise introduced by the reporting process to the variance of earnings shocks is, on average, 45 percent; (3) the reporting noise plays a significantly less prominent role in valuation, due to the persistence of shocks to economic earnings; (4) the magnitude of investors' uncertainty created by reporting noise about firms' assets in place and about future earnings is similar; and (5) ignoring the possibility of reporting distortions would bias the estimates of variance and persistence of economic earnings.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eugene Kandel

  Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center

  10 shared

• Iván Marinovic

  9 shared

• Anne Beyer

  9 shared

• Ilan Kremer

  7 shared

• Ohad Kadan

  Arizona State University

  7 shared

• Cyrus Aghamolla

  Rice University

  5 shared

• Andrzej Skrzypacz

  3 shared

• Haim Levy

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  3 shared