The paper concerns concepts of equity valuation. Three primary financial ratios -- (forward) return on equity (ROE), (forward) earnings to price ratio (EP), and the (current) market-to-book ratio (MTB) – are connected to the standard valuation parameters, r = cost of equity (discount factor),...

This paper presents a do-it-yourself algorithm to generate the historical GVKEY-CIK link table. The proposed algorithm features to pre-classify sample data into different treatment subgroups and utilizes historical firm information available from the source data to increase (reduce) matching...

Sales and profit margins are two popular earnings components discussed in the media. We study properties of one-year-ahead analyst forecasts of these two components. As sales are in dollar amounts and profit margin is a ratio, we propose robust statistical methods to assess and contrast their...

Sloan (1996), Richardson et al. (2005, 2006) examine how firms' accruals relate to subsequent financial performance. They identify a negative correlation and attribute it to accruals lack of reliability. This paper considers the issue from a different starting point: we forecast sales and...