This paper investigates whether dividends are informative about a firm's future earnings. We examine this issue by investigating the association between current year stock returns and current and future earnings for firms that pay dividends in the current year as compared to firms that do not...

Recent evidence and statements in Harris and Kemsley (1999) suggests that shareholder-level dividend taxes on retained earnings are fully impounded at the top statutory rate into stock prices. We re-examine these claims and results. Using the traditional definition of dividend tax...

This paper discusses the issues surrounding the proposals to conform financial accounting income and taxable income. The two incomes diverged in the late 1990s with financial accounting income becoming increasingly greater than taxable income through the year 2000. While the cause of this...

Using data from a survey of tax executives, we examine the corporate response to the one-time dividends received deduction in the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. We describe the firms’ reported sources and uses of the cash repatriated and we also examine non-tax costs companies incurred to...

We re-examine the widely held belief that analysts' earnings per share (EPS) forecasts are superior to random walk (RW) time-series forecasts. We investigate whether analysts' annual EPS forecasts are superior, and if so, under what conditions. Simple RW EPS forecasts are more accurate than...

In this study, we investigate whether companies with better reputations enjoy a lower cost of equity financing. Using a sample of 9,276 large U.S. companies from 1987 through 2011 and the reputation rankings from Fortune's “America's Most Admired Companies List”, we find strong evidence that...

This paper provides evidence on firms that report long quot;stringsquot; of consecutive increases in earnings per share (EPS). First, we find 746 firms that report earnings strings of at least 20 quarters since 1962, and show that this frequency is much larger than would be expected by chance....

Prior studies use fundamental earnings forecasts to proxy for the market's expectations of earnings because analyst forecasts are biased and are available for only a subset of firms. We find that as a proxy for market expectations, fundamental forecasts contain systematic measurement errors...