In this study, we dispel several popular notions regarding the meeting or beating expectations/thresholds (MBE) phenomenon that permeates the research design of many empirical papers. First, MBE is not unequivocally associated with aggressive earnings management. Second, MBE does not necessarily...

Recently, a growing body of literature has suggested that financial statements have lost their value relevance because of a shift from a traditional capital-intensive economy to a high-technology, service-oriented economy. These conclusions are based on studies that find a temporal decline in...

The paper investigates the effects of mark-to-market write-downs by financial institutions on market prices and volumes, as well as the prominent role that illiquidity plays in exacerbating the direct and spillover effects of exit valuation on equity and credit default swaps markets. Using a...

Valuation requires the prediction of future growth rate of persistent earnings, which depend on past and present internal, unobservable, investment decisions. In this study, we investigate the quot;managementquot; of the series of growth rates in a multi-period principal-agent model with a moral...

Numerous principal-agent situations of interest to accounting involve limited liability by the agent. We explore this issue when the outcome is mutually observable (MOC) and when it is not and the contract is based instead on the agent's report (NCC). We find that when outcome is not observable,...

Rule l0b-5 of the 1934 Securities and Exchange Act allows investors to sue firms for misrepresentation or omission. Since firms are principal-agent contracts between owners, contract designers and privately informed managers, owners are the ultimate firms' voluntary disclosure strategists. We...

We examine whether FASB-mandated modifications of the consolidation rules (FIN 46 and FIN 46R) resulted in perceptible changes in market participants' decisions as manifested in a variety of financial indicia. We find that financial analysts' idiosyncratic precision of information decreased and...

We revisit the role of the cash and accrual components of accounting earnings in predicting future cash flows using out-of-sample predictions, firm-specific regression estimates, and different levels of aggregation of the dependent variable, with market value of equity as a proxy for all future...

We develop novel machine learning algorithms to construct metrics of visual readability in firms' annual reports. Firms increase their use of imagery content when there is more news coverage and greater asset growth during the year. Consistent with improvements in the information environment, an...