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,...

This paper examines available industry data on two profitability measures, the price-cost margin and the ratio of quasi-rents to capital, for the purpose of determining the effect of unionism on profits. It finds that unionism reduces profitability and that this effect occurs in highly...

This paper estimates the profits to insiders when they trade their company's stock. We construct a rolling purchase portfolio' that holds all shares purchased by insiders over the previous year and an analogous sale portfolio' that holds all shares sold by insiders over the previous year. We...

This paper shows that the stock market downturns of 2000-2002 and 2007-09 have very different proximate causes. The early 2000's saw a large increase in the discount rates applied to corporate profits by rational investors, while the late 2000's saw a decrease in rational expectations of future...

The finance industry has grown, financial markets have become more liquid, information technology has undergone a revolution. But have market prices become more informative? We derive a welfare-based measure of price informativeness: the predicted variation of future cash flows from current...

The effects of inflation adjustments of corporate earnings on market prices were tested by cross section regressions of 485 manufacturing companies for the period 1966-76 and subperiods. The basic data were company reports and stock prices. For the full period, market prices reflected the...

Corporate cash flows are highly volatile and strongly procyclical. We examine the asset-pricing implications of the sensitivity of corporate cash flows to economic shocks within a continuous-time model in which dividends are a stochastic fraction of aggregate consumption. We provide closed-form...

We examine abnormal stock returns surrounding contemporaneous earnings and dividend announcements in order to determine whether investors evaluate the two announcements in relation to each other.We find that there is a statistically significant interaction effect.The abnormal return...