Not surprisingly, the recent accounting scandals look different when viewed from the perspectives of the political/regulatory process and of the market for corporate governance and financial reporting. We do not have the opportunity to observe a world in which either market or...

The concept of conditional conservatism has provided new insight into financial reporting and has stimulated considerable research since Basu (1997) developed it. While the concept encapsulated in the adage “anticipate no profits but anticipate all losses” is reasonably clear, estimating it...

A principal-components analysis demonstrates that common earnings factors explain a substantial portion of rm-level earnings variation, implying earnings shocks have substantial systematic components and are not almost fully diversifiable as prior literature has concluded. Furthermore, the...

This short essay is based on a presentation at the panel discussion on “The Most Incorrect Beliefs in Accounting” at the American Accounting Association Meetings in 2012. It addresses the inordinate amount of attention given in the literature to accounting's role in providing new information...

Book value of equity consists of two economically different components: retained earnings and contributed capital. We predict that book-to-market strategies work because the retained earnings component of the book value of equity includes the accumulation and, hence, the averaging of past...

A substantial literature investigates conditional conservatism, defined as asymmetric accounting recognition of economic shocks (“news”), and how it depends on various market, political and institutional variables. Studies typically assume the Basu (1997) asymmetric timeliness coefficient...