We investigate the extent to which the overvaluation hypothesis provides incentives for managers to beat earnings benchmarks, and whether this benchmark beating can be reliably interpreted as evidence of earnings management. We carefully identify firms immediately above earnings benchmarks that...

This study investigates the impact of mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on accrual reliability (Richardson et al. 2005). Using a large sample of Australian firm years drawn from before and after the mandatory adoption of IFRS, we find that accrual...

This study proposes and validates “other information” in analysts' forecasts as a legitimate proxy for future cash flows, and examines its incremental role in explaining stock return volatility. We suggest that “other information” contains information about fundamentals beyond that...

We investigate the informativeness of dividends and franking credits with respect to earnings persistence. We find strong evidence that dividend paying firms have more persistent earnings than non-dividend paying firms. Firms that pay franked dividends have significantly more persistent earnings...

We argue that audit quality has direct and indirect effects on the cost of equity capital. Direct effects are consistent with auditor reputation effects reflecting insurance and/or assurance roles. However, if audit quality is at least in part a reflection of expected assurance levels, then we...

Previous evidence of conservatism in Australian financial reporting, as in other countries, is constrained by the absence of a reliable firm-year specific measure. This paper calibrates such a measure using the procedure outlined by Khan and Watts (2007). We show that the C_Score they propose...

We measure the power of some simple financial statement analysis techniques for identifying instances of significant earnings overstatements, and then contrast the results with those from several measures of unexpected accruals. Our results suggest that relative to a group of matched control...