Employing a permanent earnings valuation model and a novel sample partition, we find evidence that the January effect “anomaly” is consistent with rational economic market behavior. Investors in firms which experience January effect return premiums appear to discount first quarter earnings...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to document at the firm-specific level whether firms manage earnings up or down to barely miss or meet/beat three common earnings threshold targets, namely, analysts’ forecasts (AFs), last year’s earnings and zero earnings, and whether the market rewards...