This study examines stock returns around legislative events concerning the passage of, and subsequent increase in, the excise tax on overfunded pension plan reversions. Tests are conducted to determine (1) whether those events are associated with downward revaluations of firms sponsoring defined...

The 1986 Tax Reform Act (TRA-86) reduced regular tax rates effective for tax years beginning after 1986. Firms in the highest marginal tax bracket in 1986 had an increased incentive to defer taxable income from 1986 to later years. Scholes, Wilson and Wolfson (1992) found that firms shifted...

Income reported to shareholders (book income) and income reported to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (taxable income) are alternative measures of U.S. corporate economic performance discussed in recent research, academic texts, and by U.S. legislators. In measuring economic performance,...

This paper examines the effect of a regulation change on management incentives and accrual estimates. We investigate whether managers of banks with low capital ratios reduce their banks' loan loss provisions after the 1989 change in capital standards. The loan loss provision increases the...

We compare return and volume responses to earnings announcements in the early 1960s with the early 1990s. Our results show that both the absolute return and abnormal volume over day-1 and 0 is larger for 1990s announcements. Jointly, these results are consistent with the proposition that 1990s...

Since 1995, managers of thousands of firms have voluntarily disclosed the expected date of their firm's next quarterly earnings announcement to Thomson Financial Services, Inc. These disclosures are 500 percent more accurate than the simple expectation that this year's announcement date will be...