We examine whether the properties of earnings forecasts – bias and dispersion are different across periods when macroeconomic forecasts are optimistic than non-optimistic, and whether this difference in analyst forecast optimism is stronger during recessionary periods. We find that the...

In the asymmetric cost behavior model, managers play an active role in determining cost behavior by adding or removing resources as activity changes. Cost stickiness occurs when managers deliberately retain slack resources resulting from a decline in sales activity between periods. Because both...

The critical global role of audit firms, combined with the scarcity of qualified staff and downward pressure on fees, has increased the importance of understanding efficiency in this industry. This paper examines the technical and allocative inefficiencies of audit firm staffing using data from...

The issue of asymmetric cost behavior has attracted significant interest in the managerial accounting literature. The literature has hypothesized that adjustment costs, particularly labor adjustment costs, play a significant and central role in driving empirically observed cost behavior...

Prior literature has studied firm uniqueness and its implications for capital market participants by investigating earnings uniqueness. We recognize that cost and revenue uniqueness provide separate insights about firm uniqueness because different forces drive firm-specific revenues and costs....