Financial reporting around the time of IPOs is consistent with listed firms reporting more conservatively than previously as private firms, consistent with the results in Ball and Shivakumar (2005). We hypothesize that IPO firms supply the higher quality financial reports demanded by public...

Do accruals-based accounting earnings provide better information to investors about future operating cash flows than operating cash flows themselves, as predicted by FASB's conceptual framework? The most recent evidence (Nallareddy et al., 2020) is that operating cash flows, measured correctly...

A fundamental flaw in General Price-Level Adjusted Accounting (GPLA) is that it indexes firms’ asset prices at the rate of inflation, implicitly assuming that the real and monetary sectors are independent. This is the logic of Classical macroeconomics pre-Keynes/Friedman, which long since has...

Gross profit scaled by book value of total assets predicts the cross-section of average returns. Novy-Marx (2013) concludes that it outperforms other measures of profitability such as bottom-line net income, cash flows, and dividends. One potential explanation for the measure's predictive...

A substantial literature investigates conditional conservatism, defined as asymmetric accounting recognition of economic shocks ("news"), and how it depends on various market, political, and institutional variables. Studies typically assume the Basu [1997] asymmetric timeliness coefficient (the...

The concept of conditional conservatism has provided new insight into financial reporting and has stimulated considerable research since Basu (1997) developed it. While the concept encapsulated in the adage “anticipate no profits but anticipate all losses” is reasonably clear, estimating it...