We rely on the theoretical prediction that financial misreporting peaks before economic busts to examine whether aggregate ex ante measures of the likelihood of financial misreporting improve the predictability of U.S. recessions. We consider six measures of misreporting and show that the...

An accounting-based model has strong out-of-sample power not only to detect fraud, but also to predict cross-sectional returns. Firms with a higher probability of manipulation (MSCORE) earn lower returns in every decile portfolio sorted by: Size, Book-to-Market, Momentum, Accruals, and...