This paper models the demand by auditors for bright-line financial reporting standards, and compares auditors' preferences for bright-line standards with managers' and regulators' preferences. Bright-line standards are unambiguous, requiring no judgment in their application. Standards that are...

We consider two managers’ sequential disclosure strategies. We show how the lead disclosing firm’s manager chooses his strategy anticipating the subsequent disclosure choice by a second firm’s manager. Prior studies of a single firm offer little insight into how sequential disclosure...

Using daily stock returns, we estimate the precision of information during earnings and non-earnings announcement days, and find that although the precision of information in daily stock returns increases during earnings announcement days, it explains less of the variation in expected returns...

We suggest that the failure of investors to distinguish between an earnings component's autocorrelation coefficient (unconditional persistence) and the marginal contribution of that component's persistence to the persistence of earnings (conditional persistence) provides a partial explanation to...

Financial analysis often involves decomposing variables into components, emphasizing the structured hierarchy among ratios. We distinguish between unconditional persistence (a variable's autocorrelation coefficient), and conditional persistence (the power of a variable's persistence to explain...