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,...

This paper extends the variance decomposition framework of Campbell (1991), Campbell and Ammer (1993) and Vuolteenhao (2002) to address the relative value relevance of accruals news, cash flow news and expected return news in driving firm-level equity returns. The extension is based on the...

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...

This paper investigates whether the quality of a firm's disclosure practices affects the composition of a firm's institutional investor base and whether this association has implications for a firm's stock return volatility. The findings indicate that firms with higher disclosure quality, as...

We examine the predictive information content of the management forecasts of stock return volatility (i.e., expected volatility) that are disclosed in annual reports. We find that expected volatility predicts near-term and longer-term stock return volatility and earnings volatility incremental...

Prior research finds evidence suggesting a long-term trend of declining accruals quality in the U.S. Using the Dechow and Dichev (2002) accruals quality measure, we provide new evidence that this decline began to reverse around 2000, with accruals quality generally improving through 2016. We...

There is a logical bound on the time-series variability of analyst forecasts; when variability exceeds this bound it must be caused by something besides statistically rational forecasting. We document occurrences of excessively volatile analyst forecasts and show that they influence investment...

This paper examines how a firm adjusts its disclosure quality in response to technological innovations that improve investors' private information. We show that more precise private information can endogenously amplify supply shocks and, hence, increase noise-driven (or non-fundamental) price...

This paper develops a multi-firm equilibrium model of information acquisition based on differences in firms' characteristics. It is shown that higher market-level uncertainty crowds-in investor attention to firm-level earnings announcements. Increased investor attention magnifies the earnings...

A stream of literature shows that human attention constraints affect asset pricing in predictable ways. When traders are distracted, stock prices tend to initially underreact to earnings news and then gradually incorporate the news over subsequent weeks. In modern markets, however, the majority...