Accruals are fundamental to financial reporting and are the underlying innovation of accounting. Despite this, accounting research has provided little understanding of how economic forces affect a firm's level of accruals and limited guidance for forming expectations of accruals based on ex ante...

While the shareholder benefits of audits are well documented, evidence on whether audits can facilitate opportunistic behavior by corporate insiders is scarce. In this paper, we examine whether the audit process facilitates one particular form of opportunism: informed trading by corporate...

We integrate fundamental analysis with mean-variance portfolio optimization to form fully optimized fundamental portfolios. We find that fully optimized fundamental portfolios produce large out-of-sample factor alphas with high Sharpe ratios. They substantially outperform equal-weighted and...

We investigate the presence of a shared life cycle component in earnings and test whether the earnings of one firm are relevant for valuing other firms in the same life cycle stage. We find that firm-pairs in the same life cycle stage have greater accounting comparability and greater co-movement...

Research suggests that investors fail to fully process changes in return on assets due to their incomplete processing of changes in asset turnover. We propose that investors do not fully process changes in return on assets—stemming from changes in asset turnover—because of their (1) fixation...