This paper examines how the ex ante level of public scrutiny influences a manager's subsequent decision to misreport. The conventional wisdom is that high levels of public scrutiny facilitate monitoring, suggesting a negative relation between scrutiny and misreporting. However, public scrutiny...

Change in 10-K file size robustly and negatively predicts future stock returns. The documented return predictability reflects mainly information content of 10-K file size change on future cash flow news. We examine whether this return predictability derives from managers' risk disclosures or...

A premise of standard setters and of much empirical research is that improving the quality of accounting standards and their implementation increases information in capital markets. This paper challenges this premise and shows that there are situations in which “better”, i.e., more...

We find a positive association between short-selling and accruals during 1988-2009, and that asymmetry between the long and short sides of the accrual anomaly is stronger when constraints on short-arbitrage are more severe (low availability of loanable shares as proxied by institutional...

Firm management typically claims that voluntary accounting method changes (VACs) are made to enhance the informativeness of earnings by better matching accounting practices with economic reality. In contrast, skeptics argue that managers adopt new accounting procedures to opportunistically...

We investigate two potential deterrents of aggressive pro forma reporting. First, the design of compensation contracts can encourage managers to adopt either a short- or a long-term focus. While it is difficult to observe whether compensation contracts are tied directly to pro forma earnings...

Although financial reporting fraud generates considerable losses, we find that investors do not fully exploit publicly available information relevant for detecting fraud. We show that firms with a high probability of overstated earnings have lower future earnings, less persistent...

The paper provides evidence that the relation between accruals and future returns is not symmetric. We find that firms with low accruals generate insignificant abnormal returns in asset pricing regressions that control for either earnings quality or operating volatility. In contrast, we find...

Previous studies document that market reactions to firm-level earnings news are stronger during good times than in bad times. We find that this result is driven by small firms. In fact, the market reaction to large firms' earnings news is weaker during economic expansions than contractions. We...

The paper examines the relation between the probability of manipulation, accruals, and future returns. We show that firms that have a high likelihood of earnings manipulation (as measured by the Beneish (1999)'s M-Score) experience lower future earnings, but that investors expect these firms to...