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...

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...

A principal-components analysis demonstrates that common earnings factors explain a substantial portion of rm-level earnings variation, implying earnings shocks have substantial systematic components and are not almost fully diversifiable as prior literature has concluded. Furthermore, the...

This paper examines how firm growth conditions the pricing of discretionary accruals. Given the rich growth opportunities and high information asymmetry in high-growth firms, we expect that managers have incentives to use discretionary accruals, especially income increasing (positive)...

This paper studies how a recent, substantial increase in the deposit insurance ceiling impacts discretion in banks’ loan loss provisions (LLP). We compare affected and exogenously unaffected banks using propensity-score-matched difference-in-differences. Affected banks post higher values of...