Industry Window Dressing
研究发现投资者会根据公司销售数据所在的行业分类阈值做出不同判断，而管理者会操纵销售数据跨过有利行业的门槛，从而获得实际利益。
We explore a new mechanism by which investors take correlated shortcuts and present evidence that managers—using sales management—take advantage of these shortcuts. Specifically, we exploit a regulatory provision wherein a firm's primary industry is determined by the highest sales segment. Exploiting this regulation, we provide evidence that investors classify operationally nearly identical firms as starkly different depending on their placement around this sales cutoff. Moreover, managers appear to exploit this by manipulating sales to be just over the cutoff in favorable industries. Further evidence suggests that managers engage in activities to realize large, tangible benefits from this opportunistic action. Received July 28, 2014; accepted February 8, 2016 by Editor Andrew Karolyi.