Crowdsourcing — when a task normally performed by employees is outsourced to a large network of people via an open call — is making inroads into the investment research industry. We shed light on this new phenomenon by examining the value of crowdsourced earnings forecasts. Our sample...

This paper explores directly the effect of internal control weakness (hereafter ICW) and their remediation on information precision for firms who filed Section 404 reports with the SEC. Our proxies for information precision are drawn from Barron et al. (1998). First, we find that the presence of...

This paper examines the classification of items within the income statement as an earnings management tool. Evidence is consistent with managers opportunistically shifting expenses from core expenses (cost of goods sold and selling, general, and administrative expenses) to special items. This...

We examine whether UK firms engage in earnings management or forecast guidance to ensure that their reported earnings meet analyst earnings expectations. We explore two earnings management mechanisms: a) positive abnormal working capital accruals and b) classification shifting of core expenses...

Rules implemented by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2003 impose additional disclosure and filing requirements on firms publicly disclosing non-GAAP earnings. We find the regulations produced (1) modest declines in the frequency of special- and other-item exclusions, (2) a decline...

Crowdsourcing — when a task normally performed by employees is outsourced to a large network of people via an open call — is making inroads into the investment research industry. We shed light on this new phenomenon by examining the value of crowdsourced earnings forecasts. Our sample...

The current study examines whether firms that attempt to increase EPS to meet analyst forecasts through stock repurchases tend to pay a relatively higher price for their stock than firms that repurchase stock for other purposes, such as to benefit from temporary undervaluation of their stock....

This paper examines how institutional investors respond to accounting restatements. We show that transient institutional investors, defined as institutions with shorter investment horizons and higher portfolio turnover, significantly reduce their holdings in a restating firm at least one quarter...

Nonnegative (negative) cash flow surprises help generate nonnegative (negative) earnings surprises; hence, the two surprises are generally expected to have the same sign. We document firms' propensity to report surprises of opposing signs and investigate conditions under which firms beat cash...

We examine market participants' reactions to dividend changes conditional on earnings quality. We define earnings quality as the extent to which current earnings are associated with one-year, two-year, or three-year ahead operating cash flows. Controlling for the magnitude of the dividend...