We document a growing disparity in earnings disclosure mechanisms. Firms are increasingly disclosing earnings announcements (EA) concurrently with the 10-K filing instead of first issuing a ‘stand-alone' EA. Firm adoption of concurrent EA/10-Ks is associated with lower investor sophistication,...

We document that the conventional disclosure practice of ‘stand-alone' earnings announcements (EAs), which preempt 10-K filings, is steadily disappearing over time. Instead, firms are increasingly adopting the disclosure strategy of releasing the EA concurrently with the 10-K. We first examine...

Accruals are fundamental to financial reporting and are the underlying innovation of accounting. Despite this, accounting research has provided little understanding of how economic forces affect a firm's level of accruals and limited guidance for forming expectations of accruals based on ex ante...

Prior work suggests that greater earnings disaggregation in financial statements leads to favorable market outcomes. This perspective is based on a fundamental presumption that the disaggregation separates earnings components with heterogeneous characteristics. We hypothesize that the...

There has been a substantial increase, since 2004, in the number of firms that announce annual earnings before audit completion as opposed to after audit completion. In this study, we argue that earnings announced before audit completion are associated with lower financial reporting quality and...

This study examines whether the improvement in analyst forecast accuracy around mandatory IFRS adoption is associated with the improvement in the accuracy of financial statement-based forecasts. We find significant out-of-sample improvement in financial statement-based forecast accuracy around...

Most prior research examining exclusions from street earnings (i.e., the difference between actual GAAP and street earnings) does not distinguish between exclusions that were expected versus unexpected by analysts. We consider that exclusions reflect both amounts forecasted ex ante by analysts...

We find that individual analysts following the same firm and quarter forecast different underlying street performance metrics. Relative to analysts whose street forecast is based on generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), analysts who forecast street earnings using a non-GAAP...

I/B/E/S is a common source of analyst earnings forecast data, and the reliability of these data is important for practice and academic research. Examining a common sample period, we compare annual earnings forecasts across two versions of the I/B/E/S detail file, one made available in 2009 and...

We integrate fundamental analysis with mean-variance portfolio optimization to form fully optimized fundamental portfolios. We find that fully optimized fundamental portfolios produce large out-of-sample factor alphas with high Sharpe ratios. They substantially outperform equal-weighted and...