Regulators have alleged that digital giants (Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon) have misused their market power to earn abnormal profits. Research that systematically documents whether technology firms earn abnormal profits is limited, arguably because (i) U.S. GAAP based...

Based on the current U.S. GAAP, internally developed intangibles are not included in reported assets. Omission of an increasingly important class of assets reduces the usefulness and relevance of financial statement analysis, conducted using book value. Recent studies attempt to overcome this...

We examine (i) whether the business practices of Berkshire Hathaway investees are consistent with Warren Buffett's public statements on what constitutes good accounting, governance and investing practices and (ii) whether these practices are associated with Berkshire's initial “selection” or...

We survey 401 financial executives, and conduct in-depth interviews with an additional 20, to determine the key factors that drive decisions related to performance measurement and voluntary disclosure. The majority of firms view earnings, especially EPS, as the key metric for an external...

This research investigates whether discretionary accrual decisions and use of derivative instruments areindependent of each other. We examine firms primarily engaged in oil exploration and drilling since we can identify two kinds of risks to which these firms are exposed that can cause earnings...

We propose that earnings management is driven by the prevailing investor demand for earnings surprises. Managers cater to investors by inflating earnings in periods when investors react optimistically to positive earnings surprises relative to negative earnings surprises and report more...

Sloan (1996) and several follow up papers show that the stock market behaves as though it cannot understand the implications of accruals for future earnings. We propose and find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that risk-averse arbitrageurs are unable to eliminate accrual related...

We consider stock markets in 20 countries to investigate whether the accrual anomaly (Sloan 1996), characterized by U.S. stock prices overweighting the role of accrual persistence, is a local manifestation of a global phenomenon. We explore whether the occurrence of the anomaly is related to...

We investigate a sample of 75 firms that publicly renounced quarterly EPS guidance in the post-FD period (10/2000 to 10/2004). We find that stoppers have poor trailing earnings and stock return performance. We document an average -3.8% three-day return around the announcement to stop guidance...

We estimate the relation between stock option (ESO) grants to the top five executives and future earnings to examine whether incentive alignment or rent extraction by top managers explains option granting behavior. The future operating income associated with a dollar of Black-Scholes value of an...