International large-scale assessments such as PISA are increasingly being used to benchmark the academic performance of young people across the world. Yet many of the technicalities underpinning these datasets are misunderstood by applied researchers, who sometimes fail to take their complex...

By decomposing analysts' forecast errors into common and idiosyncratic components, we develop a simple model aimed at explaining the relationship between forecast uncertainty and analyst dispersion. Under this framework, we propose a new measure of earnings forecast uncertainty as the sum of...

We provide strong support for the underappreciated expected earnings hypothesis of negative correlation between aggregate stock returns and earnings (Sadka and Sadka (2009); Choi, Kalay, and Sadka (2016)). For the 1970 to 2000 period studied by Kothari, Lewellen, and Warner (2006), our powerful...

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...

We investigate the interplay between creditor financing and the smoothness of earnings reported by European private firms and document how heterogeneous debt-contracting infrastructures across Europe moderate this relation. Most European private firms are owner-manager run enterprises with...

We examine in this paper the training and test set performance of several equity factor models with a dataset of 20 years of data, 1,200 stocks and 100 factors. First, we examine several models to forecast expected returns, which can be used as baselines for more complex models: linear...

In 2007, Michigan began requiring all high school students to take the ACT college entrance exam. This natural experiment allows us to evaluate the performance of several parametric and semiparametric sample selection correction models. We apply each model to the censored, prepolicy test score...

We propose that analysts are more likely to disaggregate earnings-per-share (EPS) forecasts into revenue and expense estimates when quality of firm financial reporting is low. The disaggregation happens because, compared to EPS forecast accuracy, revenue forecast accuracy is less adversely...