The Editor commissioned this replication of Ball and Brown (1968) for a special issue of the Pacific-Basin Finance Journal commemorating the 50th anniversary of its publication. We also describe the background to the original paper and its research design, and offer observations on its...

The accounting literature has traditionally focused on firm-level studies to examine the capital market implications of earnings and other accounting variables. We first develop the arguments for studying capital market implications at the aggregate level as well. A central issue is that...

A significant reduction in accounting-based debt covenants follows mandatory IFRS adoption, consistent with reduced contractibility of accounting information. We describe several properties of IFRS that could reduce contractibility, including increased flexibility given managers when selecting...

This essay was a Keynote Address at the Third International Conference of the Journal of International Accounting Research in São Paulo Brazil. It addresses the question of why the volume and quality of international accounting research have grown rapidly in recent years. It begins by asking...

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...

This essay provides a retrospective view on our co-authored paper, Ball and Brown (1968). The retrospective was commissioned by Gregory Waymire, then President of the American Accounting Association. It describes how we both came to be PhD students at the University of Chicago and set about...

Accruals are the non-cash component of earnings. They represent adjustments made to cash flows to generate a profit measure largely unaffected by the timing of receipts and payments of cash. Prior research uncovers two anomalies: expected returns increase in profitability and decrease in...

We examine the “confirmation” hypothesis, that audited, backward-looking financial outcomes and disclosure of managers' private forward-looking information are complements, because independent audit disciplines and hence enhances disclosure credibility. Committing to higher audit fees (a...

The sharp economic downturn and turmoil in the financial markets, commonly referred to as the “global financial crisis,” has spawned an impressive outpouring of blame. The efficient market hypothesis - the idea that competitive financial markets ruthlessly exploit all available information...