We study financial reporting and corporate governance in 218 companies accused of price fixing. These firms engage in evasive financial reporting strategies, including earnings smoothing, segment reclassification, and restatements. In corporate governance, cartel firms favor outside directors...

Insiders can artificially deflect the market prices of financial instruments from their full-information or inside value' by issuing deceptive accounting reports. Incentive support for disinformational activity comes through forms of compensation that allow corporate insiders to profit...

Managers conducting earnings conference calls display distinctive styles in their word choice. Some CEOs and CFOs are straight talkers. Others, by contrast, are vague talkers. Vague talkers routinely use qualifying words indicating uncertainty, such as “approximately”, “probably”, or...

An exclusive focus on bottom-line income misses important information about the quality of earnings. Accruals (the difference between accounting earnings and cash flow) are reliably, negatively associated with future stock returns. Earnings increases that are accompanied by high accruals,...

We construct a price, dividend, and earnings series for the Industrials sector, the Utilities sector, and the Railroads sector from the beginning of the 1870s until the beginning of the year 2013 from primary sources. To infer about mispricings in the sector markets over more than a century, we...

We decompose stock returns into components attributable to tangible and intangible information. A firm's tangible return is the component of its return attributable to fundamental accounting-performance information, and its intangible return is the component which is orthogonal to this...

The use of price earnings ratios and dividend-price ratios as forecasting variables for the stock market is examined using aggregate annual US data 1871 to 2000 and aggregate quarterly data for twelve countries since 1970. Various simple efficient-markets models of financial markets imply that...

We propose forecasting separately the three components of stock market returns: dividend yield, earnings growth, and price-earnings ratio growth. We obtain out-of-sample R-square coefficients (relative to the historical mean) of nearly 1.6% with monthly data and 16.7% with yearly data using the...