Forthcoming Papers
Review of
Accounting Studies
Volume 15, Issue 1, March 2010
The stock price
effects of changes in dispersion of investor beliefs during earnings
announcements
Lynn Rees and Wayne Thomas
Do analysts and
investors fully understand the persistence of the items excluded from Street
earnings?
Chih-Ying Chen
Propping through
related party transactions
Ming Jian
and T.J. Wong
Regulation fair
disclosure and the cost of equity capital
Zhihong Chen, Dan S. Dhaliwal and
Hong Xie
The pricing of conservative
accounting and the measurement of conservatism at the firm-year level
Jeffrey L. Callen, Ole-Kristian Hope and Dan
Segal
Disclosure of GAAP
line items in earnings announcements
Julia M. D'Souza, K. Ramesh and Min Shen
Abstracts
Volume 15, Issue 1, March 2010
The stock price
effects of changes in dispersion of investor beliefs during earnings
announcements
Lynn Rees and Wayne Thomas
Existing research provides competing theories about how dispersion of investor beliefs might affect stock prices. We measure changes in dispersion of investor beliefs around earnings announcements using changes in the dispersion of individual analysts’ forecasts. We find that the 3-day market response to earnings announcements is negatively associated with changes in dispersion, consistent with the cost of capital hypothesis. The results hold after controlling for the current earnings surprise, forecast revisions of future earnings, and reported earnings relative to various earnings thresholds. Our study provides new insight about the information contained in earnings announcements that is incremental to the magnitude and timing of cash flows.
Do analysts and
investors fully understand the persistence of the items excluded from Street
earnings?
Chih-Ying Chen
Previous research has found that the items that are included in GAAP earnings but excluded from Street earnings to allow the firm to meet or beat analyst earnings forecasts (“MBF exclusions”) are more persistent than the other excluded items. In this study, I find that the difference in the levels of persistence between MBF and non-MBF exclusions declined after the introduction of Regulation G, which requires public companies that disclose non-GAAP earnings to also present GAAP earnings and a reconciliation of the two. Analysts underestimate the persistence of non-MBF exclusions, but the degree of this underestimation is lower in the post-regulation period. In contrast, there is little evidence to indicate that analysts underestimate the persistence of MBF exclusions in either time period. I also find strong (weak) evidence that investors underestimate the persistence of Street exclusions in the pre- (post-) regulation period. These results suggest that Regulation G constrains the practice of excluding recurring expenses from Street earnings to meet or beat analyst forecasts and helps analysts and investors to understand the persistence of Street exclusions.
Propping through
related party transactions
Ming Jian
and T.J. Wong
Based on a sample of Chinese listed firms from 1998 through 2002, this paper documents that listed firms prop up earnings by using abnormal related sales to their controlling owners. Such related sales propping is more prevalent among state-owned firms and in regions with weaker economic institutions. We also find that these abnormal related sales are not entirely accrual-based but can be cash-based as well, and they serve as a substitute rather than complement to accruals management for meeting earnings targets. Since these abnormal related sales can be cash-based, there is significant cash transfer via related lending from listed firms back to controlling owners after the propping. However, no cash transfer via related lending is found to be associated with accruals earnings management.
Regulation fair
disclosure and the cost of equity capital
Zhihong Chen, Dan S. Dhaliwal and
Hong Xie
We examine the effect of Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) on the cost of equity capital. We find some evidence that (1) the cost of capital declines in the post-Reg FD period relative to the pre-Reg FD period, on average, for a broad cross-section of U.S. firms, (2) the decrease in the cost of capital post Reg FD is mainly for medium and large firms but is insignificant for small firms, and (3) the decrease in the cost of capital post Reg FD is systematically related to firm characteristics indicative of selective disclosure before Reg FD. In contrast, we find little evidence of a decrease in the cost of capital for American Depository Receipts and U.S.-listed foreign firms, which are legally exempt from Reg FD. Overall, our findings do not support a conclusion in recent studies that the cost of capital has increased post Reg FD and, if anything, suggest the opposite.
The pricing of
conservative accounting and the measurement of conservatism at the firm-year
level
Jeffrey L. Callen, Ole-Kristian Hope and Dan
Segal
This paper analyzes the relation between equity prices and conditional conservatism and introduces a new measure of conservatism at the firm-year level. We show that the asymmetric properties of conservative accounting, the existence of non-accounting sources of information, and the properties of GAAP related to special items combine to generate a nonlinear relation between unexpected equity returns and earnings news (the shock to expected current and future earnings). Based on this model, we construct a conservatism ratio (CR) defined as the ratio of the current earnings shock to earnings news. CR measures the proportion of the total shock to expected current and future earnings recognized in current year earnings. Ranking firms according to CR, we show empirically that higher CR firms have more leverage, increased volatility of returns, more incidence of losses, more negative accruals, and increased volatility of earnings and accruals, consistent with the literature on conservative accounting.
Disclosure of GAAP
line items in earnings announcements
Julia M. D'Souza, K. Ramesh and Min Shen
We provide new evidence on the disclosure in earnings announcements of financial statement line items prepared under Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). First, we investigate the circumstances that might provide disincentives generally for GAAP line item disclosures. We find that managers who regularly intervene in the earnings reporting process limit disclosures at the aggregate level and in each of the financial statements so as to more effectively guide investor attention to summary financial information. Specifically, this disclosure behavior obtains when managers habitually cater to market expectations, engage in income smoothing, or use discretionary accruals to improve earnings informativeness. Second, we predict and find that the specific GAAP line items that firms choose to disclose are determined by the differential informational demands of their economic environment, consistent with incentives to facilitate investor valuation. However, these valuation-related disclosure incentives are muted when managers habitually intervene in the earnings reporting process.