We study the economic importance of accounting information as defined by the value that a sophisticated investor can extract from publicly available financial statements when optimizing a portfolio of U.S. equities. Our approach applies the elegant new parametric portfolio policy method of...

This study speaks to investment academics and practitioners by describing and analyzing the population of return predictive signals (RPS) publicly identified during the period 1970-2010. Our supraview brings to light a number of new facts about the population of RPS, including that more than 330...

Since 2001, the number of financial statement line items forecasted by analysts and managers that I/B/E/S and FactSet capture in their electronic data feeds has soared. Taking advantage of this rich new data, we find that 11 income statement and two cash flow statement analyst and management...

We separate the forecasted one-year-ahead stock return implied by an analyst's target price into two parts: the expected compensation for bearing risk, and analyst-claimed mispricing. We use the cost of equity disclosed by analysts in their reports for the former, and the difference between the...