Despite theoretical and intuitive reasons for a credit risk premium, past research has found little supporting empirical evidence. This is primarily due to biases in computing credit excess returns which improperly account for term risk. Using data spanning 80 years in the U.S., and nearly 20...

Deleveraging risk is the risk attributable to investing in a security held by levered investors. When there is an aggregate negative shock to the availability of funding capital, securities with a greater presence of levered investors experience extreme return realizations as these investors...

We decompose broad based measures of accruals into firm specific and related firm components. We find that the negative relation between accruals and future firm performance is almost entirely attributable to the firm specific component. Standard risk based explanations are hard to reconcile...

The paper presents an accounting framework for identifying characteristics that indicate expected returns. A model links expected returns to expected earnings and earnings growth, so a characteristic indicates expected returns if it indicates expected earnings and earnings growth that the market...

We develop a comprehensive and parsimonious measure of corporate financing activities and document a negative relation between this measure and both future stock returns and future profitability. The economic and statistical significance of the results using our comprehensive measure of external...

This paper examines the extent of firm level over-investment of free cash flow. Using an accounting based framework to measure over-investment and free cash flow, I find evidence that, consistent with agency cost explanations, over-investment is concentrated in firms with the highest levels of...

This paper extends the work of Sloan (1996) by linking accrual reliability to earnings persistence. We construct a model showing that less reliable accruals lead to lower earnings persistence. We then develop a comprehensive balance sheet categorization of accruals and rate each category...

It has been alleged that firms and analysts engage in an earnings guidance game where analysts first issue optimistic earnings forecasts and then 'walk down' their estimates to a level firms can beat at the official earnings announcement. We examine whether the walk-down to beatable targets is...

A key measure of earnings quality is the deviation of net income from operating cash flows. Sloan (1996) finds that firms with high accruals (or a large gap between net income and operating cash flow) experience a decline in earnings performance not anticipated by investors, resulting in...