Prior research finds little substantial discount for managing earnings to beat analysts' consensus forecasts, but at the earnings announcement date a minority of firms disclose balance sheet data needed to estimate abnormal accruals. We consider whether the market reward for beating the forecast...

Does using earnings management to meet or beat analysts' forecasts decrease the market reward to achieving this target? We use changes in effective tax rates from the third to the fourth quarter to estimate managed earnings, following and extending Dhaliwal, Gleason and Mills (2004). We...

This paper studies the reliability of mandatory contingent liability disclosure. Contingent liabilities introduce substantial uncertainty about future earnings and the value of the firm, but little public data are available on the demands by external claimants. We use confidential audit...

We provide new evidence about how analysts incorporate and improve on management ETR forecasts. Quarterly ETR reporting under the integral method provides mandatory point-estimate forecasts by management, but firms must record certain “discrete” tax items fully in the quarter they occur,...

FIN 48, Accounting for Uncertainty in Income Taxes, standardizes accounting for uncertain tax benefits and requires companies to disclose their tax reserve amounts. We summarize hand-collected disclosures related to tax reserves from 2005 through the first quarter of 2007. For the largest 100...

FIN 48, Accounting for Uncertainty in Income Taxes (FASB 2006), requires firms to disclose tax reserves and to record changes in tax reserves at adoption of FIN 48 as cumulative effect adjustments in stockholders' equity. We predict that between the enactment and adoption of FIN 48, relative to...