We ask whether the quality of internal information matters for investment decisions. We predict that investment is more sensitive to internal profit signals and less sensitive to external price signals when managers have higher quality internal information. Consistent with recent theoretical and...

This paper examines the extent to which the rise in U.S. market-to-book ratios over the period 1980-2000 is due to expenditures on R&D becoming more profitable versus simply becoming more prevalent. More profitable R&D increases the numerator of the market-to-book ratio, while the biased nature...

Accounting measures are traditionally considered not significant from an economic point of view. In particular, accounting rates of return are often regarded economically meaningless or, at the very best, poor surrogates for the IRR, which is held to be “the” economic yield. Likewise,...

This paper examines how the characteristics of accounting systems and management incentives interact and collectively determine financial reporting quality. We develop a rational expectations equilibrium model that features a steady-state firm with investments, financial and non-financial...

We suggest that the failure of investors to distinguish between an earnings component's autocorrelation coefficient (unconditional persistence) and the marginal contribution of that component's persistence to the persistence of earnings (conditional persistence) provides a partial explanation to...

I address the interaction between accounting conservatism and real options in both a staged investment and abandonment model. An accounting policy biased towards classifying a Good (Bad) project as Bad (Good) is conservative (aggressive). The accounting signal is optimally conservative when the...

For some privately-held firms, the costs of providing high-quality accrual-based financial statements may outweigh the benefits of accommodating the demands of their stakeholders who may rely more on cash flows or have direct access to management. For other private firms, greater stakeholder...

The increasing importance of accounting narratives in corporate communications creates the need to find new investigation tools that enrich extant research in the field. This paper explores the potentialities of Corpus-Driven Linguistics (CDL) integrated with discourse analysis, an approach...

Using the transition of US firms from annual reporting to semi-annual reporting and then to quarterly reporting over the period 1950-1970, we provide evidence on the effects of increased reporting frequency on firms' investment decisions. Estimates from difference-in-differences specifications...