What are the implications of major customer dependency, i.e., the degree of a supplier firm's dependency on its major customers, for external auditors? While the conventional view emphasizes the negatives of major customer dependency for client business risk, we find that suppliers with more...

Blockchain, the technology behind digital currency, is a decentralized, distributed ledger that records transactions in digital assets. By authenticating and recording immutable transactions, decentralized blockchains perform the same function as many intermediaries in our society that establish...

Using a financial reporting and valuation model, we investigate the construct validity of Basu's (1997) asymmetric timeliness (AT) regression coefficient as a measure of conditional conservatism in corporate financial reporting. We predict that the AT coefficient will be positive even in the...

Conditionally conservative accounting practices mandate the more timely recognition of losses relative to gains through transitory negative accrual items. A direct implication of asymmetrically timely loss recognition is asymmetry in the persistence of accruals depending on whether the firm...

We revisit evidence that conditional conservatism aggregates up from the firm level causing corporate profit estimates in the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) to be more sensitive to negative relative to positive aggregate return news. Our study delivers three main messages. First,...

Basu (1997) proposes a measure of financial reporting conservatism based on asymmetry in the conditional earnings/returns relation. Patatoukas and Thomas (2011) show upward bias in this measure, because a placebo — lagged earnings — also exhibits similar asymmetry. Ball, Kothari, and...

We document a walk-down in GDP growth projections that is akin to that in sell-side analysts' earnings forecasts. While the walk-down in earnings forecasts has been generally attributed to the strategic interplay between corporate managers and sell-side analysts, professional macro forecasters...

We study the emergence of satellite imagery of parking lot traffic across major retailers as a source of alternative data in capital markets. While satellite imagery signals embed timely information for quarterly earnings announcements, stock prices do not incorporate this information prior to...

We use the IPO setting to provide evidence that accounting measures of valuation uncertainty combine with short-sales constraints to generate significant equity market mispricing. The IPOs that we predict to be most susceptible to overpricing in the immediate aftermarket have first-day returns...