This paper investigates whether and how the initiation of Credit Default Swaps (CDS) trading affects analyst optimism. First, we document that analyst forecasts become less optimistic after the initiation of CDS trading. Second, we find that the dampening effect of CDS on analyst optimism is...

This paper examines the effect of income smoothing on information uncertainty, stock returns, and cost of equity. I show that income smoothing through both total accruals and discretionary accruals tends to reduce firms' information uncertainty, as measured by stock return volatility, analyst...

Many recent studies explore how earnings properties such as opacity, conservatism, and comparability relate to stock price crash risk. Motivated by the importance of earnings guidance as a voluntary disclosure mechanism that directly provides new information to the market, we investigate how...

This study models a manager who privately reports earnings to an independent audit committee that, after its own due diligence, modifies the report for public release to investors. The audit committee alters the reporting and valuation dynamics by attempting to remove the manager's reporting...

Consistent with Jensen's (2005) agency-costs-of-overvalued-equity prediction, we find that overvaluation is statistically and economically related to subsequent income-increasing earnings management. This relation is robust to a series of tests that address potential endogeneity concerns,...

Reported earnings per share (EPS) are frequently rounded to the nearest cent. This paper provides evidence that firms manipulate earnings so that they can round-up and report one more cent of EPS. Specifically, we examine the digit immediately right of the decimal in the calculated earnings per...

We find that the negative relation between accruals and future abnormal returns documented by Sloan (1996) is due mainly to inventory changes. We propose three explanations for this result, derived from the prior literature, but find evidence inconsistent with all three explanations. To assist...

We examine the effect of earnings surprises on changes in information asymmetry. We hypothesize and find that asymmetry is lower (higher) in the quarter following positive (negative) earnings surprises compared to firms that meet the consensus analyst earnings forecast. The relations between...

This study examines the effect of a restatement on auditor's reputation as evidenced by any changes in the market value of the auditor's clients and the audit fees in the subsequent year. We find that firms sharing the same auditor as the restatement firms report a negative abnormal return...

Flotation costs represent a significant loss of capital to firms and are positively related to information asymmetry between managers and outside investors. We measure a firm's information asymmetry by its accounting information quality based on two extensions of the Dechow and Dichev earnings...