The business press generally reports news in quarterly earnings announcements based on the difference between actual earnings and two salient benchmarks: earnings of the same quarter in the previous year, and a consensus drawn from a distribution of forecasts by financial analysts. We evaluate...

Theoretical models of trade (Dontoh and Ronen, 1993; Holthausen and Verrecchia, 1990; Karpoff, 1986; Kim and Verrecchia, 1997; and Varian, 1989) show that information-based trading is a consequence of four fundamental determinants: heterogeneous prior beliefs, differential interpretations, the consensus effect,...

I examine whether the market's reaction to firms' earnings news varies with analysis (i.e., editorial content) produced by financial journalists. A series of restructuring events at The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) suggests that WSJ articles improve price discovery and increase trading volume at...

Over the past 12 years, financial analysts across the world have been optimistically wrong with their 12-month earnings forecasts by 25.3%. This study may be the first of its kind to assess analyst earnings forecast accuracy at all listed companies across the globe, covering 70 countries. A...

We analyze the quality of forward-looking information in the management reports (MR) of listed German corporations and the impact of differences in that quality on analysts' behaviour. For several years, German corporations are bounded to provide forward-looking information separately for the...

This paper provides evidence on the net stock price effects associated with managers following a disclosure strategy of guiding earnings down to a level where they can report a positive earnings surprise. Prior literature documents a stock price premium when firms meet or beat analysts'...

Prior studies in the area of management forecasts contain a common characteristic, they make no distinction as to the economic cycle of the U.S. when assessing voluntary earnings disclosures. This research tests whether voluntary earnings disclosures released during periods of an economic...

We develop and test explanations for sources of intertemporal variation in the information content of aggregate earnings and how that variation explains variation in the relation between aggregate earnings growth and market returns over time. We find that the correlation between aggregate...

Our study explores how managerial stock holdings and option holdings affect CEOs' income smoothing incentives. Given the different roles of stock holdings and option holdings in solving agency problems, managers may smooth past earnings using discretionary accruals for the purpose of revealing...

The literature on ‘cash flow' or ‘earnings' beta is theoretically well-motivated in its use of fundamentals, instead of returns, to measure systematic risk. However, empirical measures of earnings beta based on either log-linearizing the return equation or log-linearizing the clean-surplus...