Management frequently attributes earnings news to various economic events. Using textual analysis, we identify the economic factors underlying earnings news from press releases. We document a wide range of industry-wide shocks and firm-specific actions to which the earnings news in management...

Models of financial economists including Karpoff (1986), Varian (1989), Holthausen and Verrecchia (1990), and Dontoh and Ronen (1993) have demonstrated that there are three distinct fundamental determinants of trading volume reaction to new information releases: first, the extent of differences...

We analyse the relevance of losses, accounting information on tax loss carryforwards, and deferred taxes for the prediction of earnings and cash flows up to four years ahead. We use a unique hand-collected panel of German listed firms encompassing detailed information on tax loss carryforwards...

Prior to investing in a firm, fund managers must evaluate it. This tilts funds’ future portfolio positions toward former portfolio investments, as the past awareness of the firm decreases the cost of evaluating it in the future. We find that firms with many former investors experience...

We show that peer firms play an important role in shaping corporate earnings management decisions. To overcome identification issues in isolating peer effects, we use an instrumental variables strategy based on two plausibly exogenous events: fund flow-induced selling pressure by passive...

This paper investigates whether family ownership affects a firm’s cost behavior and profitability. We find that in response to changes in business activity level, family firms adjust their costs differently than non-family firms. That is, family firms decrease costs more sharply upon a sales...

We analyze the usefulness of accounting information on tax loss carryforwards and negative performance to predict earnings and cash flows. We use hand-collected information on tax loss carryforwards and the corresponding deferred taxes from the International Financial Reporting Standards tax...