We provide a bridge between the voluntary disclosure and the earnings management literature. Voluntary disclosure models focus on managers' discretion in deciding whether or not to provide truthful voluntary disclosure to the capital market. Earnings management models, on the other hand,...

In the context of the statutory tax rate reductions enacted in the Tax Reform Act of 1986, this paper investigates the degree to which capital market participants anticipate and correctly interpret temporary income effects of tax-motivated income shifting. We find evidence consistent with...

Flotation costs represent a significant loss of capital to firms and are positively related to information asymmetry between managers and outside investors. We measure a firm's information asymmetry by its accounting information quality based on two extensions of the Dechow and Dichev earnings...

The paper assesses the value of the information contained in management's determination of the accounting treatment for software development costs. The assessment is made in the context of the initial public offerings (IPO) market and is based on the effect of the accounting treatment on...

The adverse consequences of poor earnings quality have been the subject of significant debate among academics, practitioners and regulators. However, the empirical evidence on pricing implications of earnings quality is sparse and controversial. We examine one potential consequence of poor...

We document that the quality of public and private information available to investors improves before seasoned equity offerings (SEO) but deteriorates shortly thereafter. As firms improve their financial communication, analyst earnings forecasts become more accurate and less biased. However,...

We examine whether rational investor responses to information uncertainty explain properties of and returns to accounting-based trading anomalies. We proxy for information uncertainty with two measures of earnings quality: the standard deviation of the residuals from a Dechow and Dichev [2002]...

This study describes a quot;cheap-talkquot; model in which sellers can credibly convey unverifiable information by choosing whether or not to exaggerate verifiable information. We find that unexaggerated claims can communicate favorable unverifiable information if buyers are not too likely to...

This paper examines the impact of the management of reported earnings on the returns-earnings relationship. Two alternative types of earnings management behavior are modeled: myopic earnings management and income smoothing.In each setting, the manager of a firm privately observes the realized...

We examine competing explanations of the accruals anomaly, fixation and agency, using insider trading patterns and valuation measures. Quadratic regressions which control for confounding effects confirm an asymmetric relationship between trades and accruals concentrated on the selling side,...