This study finds that more conservative earnings have lower information content in that higher conditional conservatism decreases the speed with which equity investor disagreement and uncertainty resolve at earnings announcements. We find that a firm-year measure of conditional conservatism we...

We describe analytically commercial bank behavior focusing on actions banks take in response to economic gains and losses on their assets to meet regulatory leverage requirements. Our analysis shows that absent differences in regulatory risk weights across assets, leverage cannot be procyclical....

We provide evidence that firms with more transparent earnings enjoy a lower cost of capital. We develop an earnings transparency measure that captures cross-sectional and intertemporal variation in the extent to which earnings and change in earnings covary contemporaneously with stock returns....

We address whether analysts bias earnings forecast revisions and convey the bias using forecast revision consistency, i.e., the extent to which analyst reports with earnings forecast revisions include stock recommendation and target price revisions consistent in sign with the earnings forecast...

We comment on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed Reporting Threshold for Institutional Investment Managers (“Proposal”). We estimate the cost savings from the Proposal are economically small, and amount to 0.004% (0.008%) of assets under management for the average (median)...

We scrutinize the role financial reporting for fair values, asset securitizations, derivatives, and loan loss provisioning played in the Financial Crisis. Because banks were at the center of the Financial Crisis, we focus our discussion and analysis on the effects of financial reporting by...

Whether fair value accounting should be used in financial reporting has been the subject of debate for many years. A key dimension to this debate is whether fair value earnings can provide information to financial statement users that is helpful in making their economic decisions. A criticism of...

This study addresses whether firms provide more voluntary disclosures if they redact otherwise mandatorily disclosed contract information, whether firms have higher information uncertainty after they redact, and, if so, the extent to which this higher uncertainty is mitigated by the disclosures....