This paper examines the effect of income smoothing on information uncertainty, stock returns, and cost of equity. I show that income smoothing through both total accruals and discretionary accruals tends to reduce firms' information uncertainty, as measured by stock return volatility, analyst...

This study explores insider trading as a function of differences between managers' and the market's assessment of company earning components - specifically operating cash flows and accruals. It extends prior research by more comprehensively studying earnings components. It also builds a...

This paper investigates whether the decision to issue a management earnings forecast is related to information asymmetry in the market for the firm s stock and whether the forecasts reduce the asymmetry. Theoretical models hold that a portion of the bid-ask spread arises because of asymmetric...

Recent accounting research finds that the discretionary accrual component of earnings communicates managers' private information to stock market participants. We show that effects related to managerial compensation contracts and corporate debt agreements influence how the stock market interprets...

This paper extends the variance decomposition framework of Campbell (1991), Campbell and Ammer (1993) and Vuolteenhao (2002) to address the relative value relevance of accruals news, cash flow news and expected return news in driving firm-level equity returns. The extension is based on the...

This paper reveals that in addition to fundamental factors, the 52-week high price and recent investor sentiment play an important role in analysts' target price formation. Analysts' forecasts of short-term earnings and long-term earnings growth are shown to be important explanatory variables...

We examine the predictability of 299 capital market anomalies enhanced by 30 machine learning approaches and over 250 models in a dataset with more than 500 million firm-month-anomaly observations. We find significant monthly (out-of-sample) returns of around 1.8-2.0%, and over 80% of the models...

I estimate a theory-based behavioral momentum using analysts' predictable underreaction (APU) as a proxy for newswatchers underreaction. The results show that APU strongly predicts analysts' errors and, more importantly, stock returns. A long-short strategy based on APU generates a...

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...

We examine the value of analyst recommendations across 45 countries and 3.8 million firm-month observations from 1994 to 2019. Recommendation-based portfolio strategies lead to highly significant (insignificant) abnormal returns in international markets (in the U.S.). In line with...