The accounting literature has traditionally focused on firm-level studies to examine the capital market implications of earnings and other accounting variables. We first develop the arguments for studying capital market implications at the aggregate level as well. A central issue is that...

Book value of equity consists of two economically different components: retained earnings and contributed capital. We predict that book-to-market strategies work because the retained earnings component of the book value of equity includes the accumulation and, hence, the averaging of past...

Accruals are the non-cash component of earnings. They represent adjustments made to cash flows to generate a profit measure largely unaffected by the timing of receipts and payments of cash. Prior research uncovers two anomalies: expected returns increase in profitability and decrease in...

Do accruals-based earnings provide better information about future operating cash flows than do operating cash flows themselves, as predicted by the Financial Accounting Standards Board's conceptual framework (FASB 1978)? While this is a foundational issue in accounting, because it addresses the...

We revisit the literature on using accounting earnings to estimate firm-level systematic risk, using macroeconomic indicators rather than listed-firm indexes to measure aggregate risk. Conventional listed-firm indexes reflect an unrepresentative subset of aggregate assets and thus are expected...