We examine the relation between the relative amount of fees paid to auditors for non-audit services and the behavior of accrual measures. We extend prior research in two important directions. First, using a pooled sample of 2,295 firms for the fiscal year 2000, we find very little evidence of a...

We examine whether managers' trading decisions (both at a firm and personal level) are correlated with trading strategies suggested by the operating accruals and the post-earnings announcement drift (SUE) anomalies. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of the use of managerial trading...

We examine the relation between the fees paid to auditors for audit and non-audit services and the choice of accrual measures for a large sample of firms. Using our pooled sample, we find that the ratio of non-audit fees to total fees has a positive relation with the absolute value of accruals...

Do short sale transactions precede bad news events? Not recently. This paper examines short sale transactions around significant news events. Using a novel and comprehensive dataset covering daily short sale transactions for 4,193 securities on the New York Stock Exchange for the period April 1,...

Following Sloan (1996), numerous studies show that the accrual component of earnings is less persistent than the cash flow component of earnings. Disagreement exists, however, as to the explanation for this result. Xie (2001) attributes the result to managerial discretion. Fairfield et al....

We develop a comprehensive and parsimonious measure of the extent to which a firm is raising (distributing) capital from (to) capital market participants. We show that the relation between our measure of net external financing and future stock returns is stronger than has been documented in...

We extend the analysis in Sloan (1996) to identify the source of information in accruals about earnings quality. Our results indicate that information in accruals about earnings quality is not limited to the current accruals analyzed by Sloan, but extends to non-current accruals. We also show...

Prior research has documented the empirical regularity that more firms than expected (i) report small positive earnings and (ii) have zero forecast errors. It appears that management avoid reporting negative earnings or disappointing analysts. We investigate how and why firms beat these...

We examine whether managers' trading decisions (both at a firm and personal level) are correlated with trading strategies suggested by the operating accruals and the post-earnings announcement drift (SUE) anomalies. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of the use of managerial trading...

Prior research shows that the cash component of earnings is more persistent than the accrual component of earnings. We investigate whether the persistence of the cash component is influenced by management's decision to retain or distribute cash flows. We find that when firms retain the cash...