Existing research indicates that firms with high accruals are more likely to experience future earnings problems, but that investors' expectations, as reflected in stock prices, do not appear to anticipate these problems. In this paper, we directly examine the published opinions of two types of...

Prior research has documented a "kink" in the earnings distribution: too few firms report small losses, too many firms report small profits. We investigate whether boosting of discretionary accruals to report a small profit is a reasonable explanation for this "kink". Overall, we are unable to...

We decompose broad based measures of accruals into firm specific and related firm components. We find that the negative relation between accruals and future firm performance is almost entirely attributable to the firm specific component. Standard risk based explanations are hard to reconcile...

The paper presents an accounting framework for identifying characteristics that indicate expected returns. A model links expected returns to expected earnings and earnings growth, so a characteristic indicates expected returns if it indicates expected earnings and earnings growth that the market...

We outline a parsimonious empirical model to assess the relative usefulness of accounting and equity market based information to explain corporate credit spreads. The primary determinant of corporate credit spreads is the physical default probability. We compare existing accounting-based and...

Across multiple measures of “liquidity” and a variety of methods to control for correlated characteristics of more (less) liquid bonds, we find only limited evidence of a liquidity premium in the cross section of corporate bonds. Specifically, while illiquid bonds have slightly higher credit...