Existing research indicates that firms with high accruals are more likely to experience future earnings problems, but that investors' expectations, as reflected in stock prices, do not appear to anticipate these problems. In this paper, we directly examine the published opinions of two types of...

Following Sloan (1996), numerous studies document that the accrual component of earnings is less persistent than the cash flow component of earnings. Disagreement exists, however, as to the explanation for this result. One stream of literature follows Sloan's lead in arguing that this result is...

Prior research has documented a "kink" in the earnings distribution: too few firms report small losses, too many firms report small profits. We investigate whether boosting of discretionary accruals to report a small profit is a reasonable explanation for this "kink". Overall, we are unable to...

We offer several suggestions for researchers using corporate bond return data. First, despite clear instructions from older papers (e.g., Bessembinder et al. 2009) about ways to compute credit excess returns, a lot of recent research simply subtracts a Treasury-bill return. We show that this...

Interest in sustainable investing has exploded in recent years, initially focused on public equity markets, but now evolving into fixed income. We assess various aspects of sustainable investing for developed market corporate bond markets (both Investment Grade and High Yield). Using a...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>Prior research shows that the cash component of earnings is more persistent than the accrual component. We decompose the cash component into: (1) the change in the cash balance, (2) issuances/distributions to debt, and (3) issuances/distributions to equity. We find that the higher...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>This paper lays out a decomposition of book-to-price (B/P) that derives from the accounting for book value and that articulates precisely how B/P "absorbs" leverage. The B/P ratio can be decomposed into an enterprise book-to-price (that pertains to operations and potentially reflects...