We analyze the relation between corporate financing activities and sell-side analysts' investment research. We document pervasive evidence of overoptimism in sell-side analysts' earnings forecasts, stock recommendations and target prices that is systematically related to corporate financing...

This paper explores whether firms that share common directors also pursue similar corporate policies. Using a sample of 885 U.S. firms with common directors, we find that director fixed effects strongly explain variation in firms' governance, financial, disclosure, and strategic policy choices....

We develop a comprehensive and parsimonious measure of the extent to which a firm is raising (distributing) capital from (to) capital market participants. We show that the relation between our measure of net external financing and future stock returns is stronger than has been documented in...

We extend the analysis in Sloan (1996) to identify the source of information in accruals about earnings quality. Our results indicate that information in accruals about earnings quality is not limited to the current accruals analyzed by Sloan, but extends to non-current accruals. We also show...

Existing research indicates that firms with high accruals are more likely to experience earnings reversals and lower returns in the future. It has further been shown that analysts and auditors do not anticipate these consequences. In this paper, I examine a sophisticated set of investors (short...

Prior research has documented the empirical regularity that more firms than expected (i) report small positive earnings and (ii) have zero forecast errors. It appears that management avoid reporting negative earnings or disappointing analysts. We investigate how and why firms beat these...

In this paper we examine whether the utilization of independent valuers provides a credible signal about the underlying reliability of upward asset revaluations. A sample of recognized Australian asset revaluations is used to compare the reliability of independent and director based revaluations...

Existing research indicates that firms with high accruals are more likely to experience future earnings reversals and SEC enforcement actions for GAAP violations, but that investors do not appear to anticipate these consequences. In this paper, we directly examine the published opinions of two...

This paper examines the dynamic behavior of analysts' earnings forecasts over the twelve months preceding annual earnings announcements. We investigate the claim that analysts make optimistic forecasts at the start of the year and then 'walk down' their estimates to a level the firm is likely to...

This paper lays out a decomposition of book-to-price (B/P) that articulates precisely how B/P quot;absorbsquot; leverage. The B/P ratio can be decomposed into an enterprise book-to-price (that pertains to operations and potentially reflects operating risk) and a leverage component (that reflects...