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...

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...