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 examines the cross-sectional implications of the inflation illusion hypothesis for the post-earnings-announcement drift. The inflation illusion hypothesis, which was proposed by Modigliani and Cohn (1979), suggests that stock market investors fail to incorporate inflation in...

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...

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...

This study analyzes the information conveyed by the restatements of financial reports. We argue that restatements contain news about the investment projects of the restating firms' competitors. This news causes competitors to revise their beliefs about the projects' value, and to modify their...

We investigate the association between errors in management forecasts of subsequent year earnings and current year accruals. In an uncertain operating environment, managers' assessments of their firms' business prospects are imperfect. Since managers' imperfect business assessments influence...

Controlling for firm-specific characteristics determining financial reporting quality, this paper finds evidence of a negative association between firms' total risk and financial reporting quality. While the results imply that firms providing financial information of higher quality do not...