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...

The choice between fair value and historical cost accounting is the subject of long-standing controversy among accounting academics and regulators. Nevertheless, the market-based evidence on this subject is very limited. We study the choice of fair value versus historical cost accounting for...

Building on contracting theory, we argue that financial covenants control the conflicts of interest between lenders and borrowers via two different mechanisms. Capital covenants control agency problems by aligning debtholder-shareholder interests. Performance covenants serve as tripwires that...

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...

A dual-class ownership structure, accompanied by disproportional control rights, is traditionally considered to be an inferior form of governance. We examine how the capital structure choices made by dual-class firms (i.e., by their controlling shareholders or insiders), as well as the...

We show that the agency theory of overvalued equity (see Jensen, 2005) rather than investors' fixation on accruals explains the accrual anomaly, i.e., abnormal returns to an accrual trading strategy (see Sloan, 1996).Under the agency theory of overvalued equity, managers of overvalued firms are...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we provide a discussion of the problems associated with endogeneity in empirical accounting research. We emphasize problems arising when endogeneity is caused by (1) unobservable firm specific factors and (2) omitted variables and discuss the merits...

Carrizosa and Ryan (2017) explore the use of private information covenants, which contractually oblige borrowers to provide their lenders with private information: projected or intra-quarter financial statements. The authors offer evidence that creditors acquire private information about...

Book value of equity consists of two economically different components: retained earnings and contributed capital. We predict that book-to-market strategies work because the retained earnings component of the book value of equity includes the accumulation and, hence, the averaging of past...

I develop a new approach to understanding accounting accruals. I start by introducing a model that explicitly incorporates the role of accruals in measuring firm performance. Using this model, I characterize accounting quality by the degree to which accruals fulfill their performance measurement...