We study a model of financial reporting where investors infer the precision of reported earnings. Reporting a larger earnings surprise reduces the inferred earnings precision, dampening the impact on firm value of reporting higher earnings, and providing a natural demand for smoother earnings....

Starting in 1997, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission required that some firms disclose information about risks. One format for risk disclosures let firms disclose correlations by allowing firms to report the sensitivity to market risk factors of cash flows related only to financial...

We build a modified measure of disaggregation quality (MDQ), based on the disaggregation quality (DQ) measure from Chen, Miao, and Shevlin (2015). Like DQ, MDQ is a parsimonious measure of data disaggregation quality in the annual report that can be constructed through the percentage of...

We build an articulating financial statements model in which the beginning and ending balance sheet amounts are explicitly linked to accruals. We distinguish accruals based on the source financial statement of the accruals, either the cash flow statement, balance sheet, or statement of owners'...

This study examines whether firms transfer income between the income statement and other comprehensive income (OCI) to manage earnings. The results are consistent with managers opportunistically reclassifying income as OCI and OCI as income. Specifically, we find that firms strategically...

Using the Financial Statement Balancing Model (FSBM) from Compustat, we examine whether financial statement data articulate for 10,681 U.S. non-financial firms for 24 years, a total of 92,951 firm years. We accomplish three specific research goals. First, we build the first formal model of...

Verrecchia (1983) investigates a manager's incentives for costly, discretionary disclosure of his information to risk-averse traders when the functional form of prices is exogenously specified. We extend Verrecchia (1983) by deriving the endogenously determined functional form of prices that...

We develop the first general equilibrium exchange economy with risk-averse investors where firm managers can voluntarily make costly, discretionary disclosures regarding the liquidating value of the firm. This extends the discretionary disclosure setting of Verrecchia (1983) by relaxing the...

We model managers' equilibrium strategies for voluntarily disclosing information about their firm's risk. We consider a multi-firm setting in which the variance of each firm's future cash flow is uncertain. A manager can disclose, at a cost, this variance before offering the firm for sale in a...

In this study I use a principal-agent framework to analyze optimal contracting under two accounting standards, referred to as historical cost (HC) and market value (MV), and under differing asset market assumptions. I distinguish HC from MV by how revenue is recognized and in the reporting...