Managers' incentives to round up reported EPS cause under-representation of the number four in the first post-decimal digit of EPS, or "quadrophobia." We develop a novel measure of aggressive financial reporting practices based on a firm's history of quadrophobia. Quadrophobia is pervasive and...

This is a preliminary study on the status of the U.S. in the global market for derivatives-related services. We include some of the policy choices available to enhance this status. We begin with a review of the importance of active and efficient derivatives markets for the U.S. economy. We then...

Many have argued that financial statements created under an accounting model that measures financial instruments at fair value would not fairly represent a bank's business model. In this study we examine whether financial statements using fair values for financial instruments better describe...

An analysis of about 300000 earnings forecasts, created by 18000 individual forecasters for earnings of over 300 S&P listed firms, shows that these forecasts are predictable to a large extent using a statistical model that includes publicly available information. When we focus on the...

Analysts often update their recommendations following corporate news. Questions have been raised regarding analysts' ability to generate new information beyond recent corporate events. Employing a comprehensive database on corporate news we show that only a small minority of 27.9% of all...

Li (2011) proposes a quarterly earnings prediction model for loss generating firms, shows that it produces better specified future earnings estimates relative to naïve quarterly forecast models, and that it can be used to form a trading strategy that produces economically significant annual...

The aim of this paper is to examine what has been the role of information provision to the market throughout the crisis. We consider two main sources of information to the market, financial statements and information provided by credit rating agencies. We examine how these sources of information...

We first examine whether analysts with certain characteristics that prior research has identified are related to superior forecasting ability systematically time their forecast revisions later in the fiscal quarter. We then examine whether this superior ability persists after controlling for...

This article describes employee stock option mechanism and underlines the rationale for ESO grants. It also explains how ESOs differ from ordinary call options. In recent years, accounting scandals (e.g., Enron, Tyco and WorldCom) created an environment that demanded more transparent and higher...