This paper examines the role of earnings quality in the future performance of firms that marginally miss or beat analysts' forecasts. We focus primarily on two groups of firms: those that miss their forecast but appear not to have attempted to exceed it by managing earnings, and those that...

The existing replication policies at top finance journals are far weaker than the policies at top economics journals. This paper explores both the costs and benefits of having a stronger replication policy in the context of my failed 2010 initiative to develop a unified policy across all top...

This paper examines the performance consequences of cutting discretionary expenditures and managing accruals to exceed analyst forecasts. We show that firms that just beat analyst forecasts with low quality earnings exhibit a short-term stock price benefit relative to firms that miss forecasts...

We examine the out-of-sample performance of 240 stock market anomalies enhanced by 49 machine learning algorithms and over 260 individually trained models across an international data sample of nearly 1.9 billion stock-month-anomaly observations from 1980 to 2019. We demonstrate significant...

This paper assesses the extent to which the disaggregated book-tax differences (BTDs) detailed in the tax footnote are associated with earnings persistence and growth, and the extent to which these associations matter to investors. Using hand-collected data from the schedule of deferred tax...

Over the past 20 years, active fixed income (FI) managers have tended to deliver returns in excess of their benchmarks. This has generated a popular notion that active investing in fixed income markets is ‘easy'. Our aim is to assess the veracity of that notion. Across a broad set of popular...

Style investing has become part of the investing nomenclature for equity markets. To date, despite the massive size of fixed income markets, little research has examined the efficacy of style-based investing in fixed income. In this paper we summarize a common style based framework for capturing...

We examine whether fundamental measures of volatility are incremental to market based measures of volatility in (i) predicting bankruptcies (out of sample), (ii) explaining cross-sectional variation in credit spreads, and (iii) explaining future credit excess returns. Our fundamental measures of...

We examine the role of fundamental accounting information in shaping portfolio performance. Using a conditional performance approach, we address the concern that the positive relationship between Piotroski's F Score and ex post returns is due to risk compensation. Our results show that...

Value investing is the age-old investment strategy that involves buying securities that appear cheap relative to some fundamental anchor. For equity investors that anchor is typically a measure of intrinsic value linked to financial statement variables. Recently, there has been much written...