Residual income valuation is based on the assumption that the clean surplus relation holds. As pointed out by Ohlson (2000), among others, the standard clean surplus relation is frequently violated. Moreover, standard residual income valuation models rest on the implicit assumption that future...

I find strong evidence of insiders selling shares prior to imminent bad earnings news through their Rule 10b5-1 trading plans. While Rule 10b5-1 trading plans may conjure images of regular selling over a sustained period of time, I find that insiders' sales under these plans often consist of a...

Management frequently attributes earnings news to various economic events. Using textual analysis, we identify the economic factors underlying earnings news from press releases. We document a wide range of industry-wide shocks and firm-specific actions to which the earnings news in management...

We investigate the effect of standard setters in standard setting: We examine how certain professional and political characteristics of FASB members and SEC commissioners predict the accounting “reliability” and “relevance” of proposed standards. Notably, we find FASB members with...

The aim of this paper is to trace the principal ideas in Paton and Littleton's influential 1940 monograph to their previous and contemporaneous writings, and thus to uncover the ideas' origins in the literature

We regard accounting regulation as a politico-economic institution and analyze its evolution in the presence of changing investor sentiment. When the market sentiment is moderate, if most of the business projects in the economy are successful, the economy will enter a stable high-disclosure...

This paper investigates the design of recognition thresholds in accounting standards. In statistics, a threshold classi.es evidence to balance two types of recognition errors weighted by their respective costs to a decision maker. In accounting recognition standards, a threshold induces firms to...

We examine whether managers convey more information via voluntary disclosure channels when standard-setters limit managers' discretion in GAAP. We estimate the extent to which standard setters limit managers' discretion by counting the number of times obligatory modal verbs are mentioned in the...

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...