This paper analyzes the characteristics of earnings in valuation settings where the dividend policy is irrelevant to equity value. The paper first demonstrates an equivalent characterization of dividend policy irrelevancy (DPI) in a general linear dynamic. It then proceeds to show how DPI leads...

The paper concerns concepts of equity valuation. Three primary financial ratios -- (forward) return on equity (ROE), (forward) earnings to price ratio (EP), and the (current) market-to-book ratio (MTB) – are connected to the standard valuation parameters, r = cost of equity (discount factor),...

The paper discusses two issues related to “growth”. Both have arguably not been dealt with adequately in the literature. The first concerns growth and accruals. Research practice combines two components of accruals, asset accruals and liability accruals. This simplification causes problems...

This paper examines commonly applied methods of data analysis. Predicated on these methods, the main issue pertains to the plausibility of the studies end products, that is, their conclusions. I argue that the methods chosen often lead to unwarranted conclusions: the data analyses chosen tend to...

This paper concerns potential disparities between narratives and statistical evidence in empirical accounting research. We focus on the extent to which a regression model's main variable of interest contributes incrementally to the explanation of the dependent variable. We replicate ten recently...

This paper develops an analytically coherent yet parsimonious framework which explains market returns in terms of contemporaneous information. It anchors on the idea that valuation (static perspective) can be connected to the dynamics that explains returns, and vice versa. The framework requires...

Sales and profit margins are two popular earnings components discussed in the media. We study properties of one-year-ahead analyst forecasts of these two components. As sales are in dollar amounts and profit margin is a ratio, we propose robust statistical methods to assess and contrast their...

Sloan (1996), Richardson et al. (2005, 2006) examine how firms' accruals relate to subsequent financial performance. They identify a negative correlation and attribute it to accruals lack of reliability. This paper considers the issue from a different starting point: we forecast sales and...