Loughran and Ritter (1995) document that firms issuing seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) severely underperform the stock market for three to five years after the offering. Our paper examines the hypothesis that SEO investors are too optimistic because they naively extrapolate earnings trends...

Loughran and Ritter (1995) document that firms issuing seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) severely underperform the stock market for three to five years after the offering. Our paper examines the hypothesis that SEO investors are too optimistic because they naively extrapolate earnings trends...

Issuers of initial public offerings (IPOs) can report earnings in excess of cash flows by taking positive accruals. This paper provides evidence that issuers with unusually high accruals in the IPO year experience poor stock return performance in the three years thereafter. IPO issuers in the...

Ritter and Loughran~(1995a) and Spiess and Affleck-Graves~ (1995) document that firms issuing seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) severely underperform the stock market within five years after the offering. Our paper examines the hypothesis that SEO investors are too optimistic because they naively...

This paper examines accounting earnings and the associated accrual and cash flow components in the years surrounding an initial public offering (IPO) to study the incentives and opportunities for firms to manage earnings when going public. We identify firm and offering characteristics that may...

We find that analysts' forecast errors are predicted by past accounting accruals (adjustments to cash flows to obtain reported earnings) among both equity issuers and non-issuers. Analysts are more optimistic for the subsequent four years for issuers reporting higher issue-year accruals. The...

We find evidence that initial public offering (IPO) firms, on average, have high positive issue-year earnings and abnormal accruals, followed by poor long-run earnings and negative abnormal accruals. The IPO-year abnormal, and not expected, accruals explain the cross-sectional variation in...

We examine empirically whether earnings management as measured by discretionary accounting accruals explain post-issue stock return underperformance for IPO firms. We find that high discretionary accounting accruals are related to negative abnormal stock returns with high statistical...