The accruals anomaly - the negative relationship between accounting accruals and subsequent stock returns - has been well documented in the academic and practitioner literatures for almost a decade. To the extent that this anomaly represents market inefficiency, one would expect sophisticated...

We examine whether managers' trading decisions (both at a firm and personal level) are correlated with trading strategies suggested by the operating accruals and the post-earnings announcement drift (SUE) anomalies. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of the use of managerial trading...

This paper examines how capital market pressures and institutional factors shape firms' incentives to report earnings that reflect economic performance. To isolate the effects of reporting incentives, we exploit the fact that, within the European Union, privately held corporations face the same...

This paper unveils the rationality behind the widely criticized practice of consensus-beating, where companies try to report quarterly earnings equal to or slightly exceeding analysts expectations. In a simple theoretical model we show that a high-growth company can use active earnings guidance...

SFAS 109, Accounting for income taxes, was criticized for allowing firms to set arbitrarily high valuation allowances against deferred tax assets at adoption as quot;hidden reservesquot; that firms could use in future periods to manage earnings. Consistent with these claims, bank managers make...

Naively testing for accruals mispricing in 26 equity markets - one market at a time - we find statistical evidence of anomalous returns in some countries. However, some of these findings might well be spurious because of data snooping biases that arise when simultaneously testing several...

We document considerable return comovement associated with accruals after controlling for other common factors. An accrual-based factor-mimicking portfolio has a Sharpe ratio of 0.16, higher than that of the market factor or the SMB and HML factors of Fama and French (1993). According to...

In this paper, we examine the effects of the cross-correlation of stock returns on the long-run post merger stock performance of UK acquiring firms over the period 1985-2001. We show that, in general, the widely documented anomaly of long-run underperformance following mergers is not due to...

We examine competing explanations of the accruals anomaly, fixation and agency, using insider trading patterns and valuation measures. Quadratic regressions which control for confounding effects confirm an asymmetric relationship between trades and accruals concentrated on the selling side,...

We examine changes in the market's response to financial statement restatement announcements during the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) era. We define this era as beginning with the U.S. Department of Justice initiation of a criminal investigation into the collapse of Enron, and its attendant loss of...