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...

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...

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...

One objection to fair value accounting for liabilities is that changes in a company’s credit risk are recognized as gains or losses in a manner that is counterintuitive to the way gains and losses are typically interpreted (Lipe 2002). Specifically, when a company’s credit risk increases...

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...