Putting an end to the “earnings game” requires that CEOs reclaim the initiative by avoiding earnings guidance and managing expectations in such a way that their stocks trade reasonably close to their intrinsic value. In place of earnings forecasts, management should provide information about...

The paper discusses common mistakes made by financial profession when valuating cash flows by applying inconsistent weighted average discount rates to cash flows to equity, to unlevered firm, to levered firm or other complex cash flows not regarding their type (constant or growing perpetuities,...

Recent work in management accounting offers several novel insights into firms' cost behavior. This study explores whether financial analysts appropriately incorporate information on two types of cost behavior in predicting earnings - cost variability and cost stickiness. Since analysts'...

This paper analyzes whether the new business segment reporting disclosure rules, SFAS 131, will actually provide capital market participants with more predictive ability than the previous rules. For this we conduct three experiments. Two experiments with advanced accounting students as subjects,...

This study examines whether key characteristics of analysts' forecasts — timeliness, accuracy, and informativeness — change when investor demand for information is likely to be especially high, i.e., during periods of high uncertainty. Findings reveal that when uncertainty is high, analysts'...

In this paper, we assess the equity value relevance of disclosure-derived financial statement adjustments. Prior literature has explored only the incremental explanatory power of individual adjustments, or has assessed the superiority of earnings recast using only a subset of prescribed...

This paper examines the initiation of analyst coverage of IPO firms in the presence of management forecasts. For a sample of 763 Australian IPOs from 1992 to 2004, we find firms that provide a management forecast in the prospectus are more likely to receive analyst coverage, after correcting for...

We investigate whether the adoption of IFRS in 2005 by Australian firms has been associated with a loss of potentially useful information about intangible assets, as conjectured by Matolcsy and Wyatt (2006). We find that the negative association between analyst forecast error...

Recent literature suggests that other information included with management earnings forecasts may not be useful to the market as a direct disclosure. I use regression analysis to investigate whether this type of disclosure can help analysts to formulate more accurate forecasts of earnings....

This paper assesses the performance of securities analysts in forecasting the future earnings of intangible firms. The assessment is relative to extrapolative time-series models of earnings forecasts. The paper's results show that the forecast errors produced by both analysts and extrapolative...