Investors, regulators, academics, and researchers all emphasize the importance of financial statement comparability. However, an empirical construct of comparability is typically not specified. In addition, little evidence exists on the benefits of comparability to users. This study attempts to...

This is a course material (slides in pdf format) from the book 'Investment Decision Making For Firm and Project Valuation.' The book is originally in Spanish and is untitled as 'Decisiones de inversion. Para la valoracion financiera de proyectos y empresas.' Chapter 5 deals with how to prepare...

This is a course material (slides in pdf format) for the chapter Financial Analysis and Control Financial Ratio Analysis already in SSRN. In these slides I present a detailed explanation of different financial ratios commonly used in financial management. We introduce some examples in the slides...

We show that actively managed U.S. hedge funds, on average, trade on the post-earnings announcement drift anomaly more aggressively than mutual funds. Both mutual and hedge funds that actively trade on drift anomaly face higher arbitrage risk. However arbitrage risk reduces mutual funds'...

We correlate analysts' forecast errors with temporal variation in investor sentiment. We find that when sentiment is high, analysts' forecasts of one-year-ahead earnings and long-term earnings growth are relatively more optimistic for “uncertain” or “difficult to value” firms. Adding...

We examine whether greater transparency leads to improved evaluation and rewarding of management. We posit that disclosure improves board effectiveness at monitoring executives and in strengthening the link between pay and performance. We use management guidance as our empirical proxy for...

We examine the extent to which analysts who participate in earnings conference calls by asking questions possess superior private information relative to analysts who do not ask questions. Using a large sample of earnings conference call transcripts over the period 2002 to 2005, we find that...

Theory suggests that the informativeness of price at the time of an earnings announcement increases with the number of informed traders who possess superior information to process news from firm disclosures (Kyle 1985; Admati and Pfleiderer 1988; Kim and Verrecchia 1994). In this paper, we investigate...

This study compares the performance of sell-side equity analysts with and without a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation. Using a large sample of forecasts, our tests indicate that CFA charterholders issue forecasts that are timelier than those of non-charterholders. The results for...

The aim of this research is to examine the effect of defensive measures (DMs) on earnings management in an owner dominant environment such as Continental Europe, where control is assumed to be exercised by large shareholders. Thus, compared to the manager dominant context of the US/UK, in the...