Earnings management is a key issue for financial reporting. The purpose of this paper is to derive a set of indices to measure the pervasiveness of earnings management (PEM) using the properties of quarterly accrual volatility. The PEM index can be viewed as a quality measure of financial...

We study conference calls as a voluntary disclosure channel and create a proxy for the time horizon that senior executives emphasize in their communications. We find that our measure of disclosure time horizon is associated with capital market pressures and executives' short-term monetary...

We analyze the impact of the French 2012 financial transaction tax (FTT) on trading volumes, stock prices, stock liquidity and volatility. We extend the empirical research by the identification of FTT announcement and short-run treatment effects, which may distort difference-in-differences...

Information processing filters out the noise in data but it takes time. Hence, low precision signals are available before high precision signals. We analyze how this feature affects asset price informativeness when investors can acquire signals of increasing precision over time about the payoff...

This study documents the prominent role of idiosyncratic risk in impeding arbitrage activities with regard to a new value-to-price anomaly. Adopting the theoretical foundation and empirical specification of Hwang and Sohn's (2010) real-option-based valuation model, we measure the intrinsic value...

High-frequency trading has become a dominant force in the U.S. capital market, accounting for over 70% of dollar trading volume. This study examines the implication of high-frequency trading for stock price volatility and price discovery. I find that high-frequency trading is positively...

This paper shows that in asset pricing the information environment gives rise to a systematic risk factor when the informativeness of future news events varies with their content (i.e., bad news and good news are not equally informative). The paper further shows that in such cases (cross) serial...

Variation in idiosyncratic return volatility from 1978 to 2009 is attributable to discretionary accrual volatility and the correlation between pre-managed earnings and discretionary accruals reflective of information quality across firms. These results are robust to controls for firm operating...

We find that lower ex-ante earnings volatility leads to higher Post-Earnings Announcement Drift (PEAD). PEAD is a function of both the magnitude of an earnings surprise and its persistence. While prior research has largely investigated market reactions to the magnitude of the earnings surprise,...

Firm Profitability - Does it really matter for shareholder return or ROE (return on equity)? Does this question sound oxymoron and antithetic? Not really. On the contrary, evidence has surfaced that Returns on equity - based on the shareholders' equity accounted in the balance sheet - is not...