This study examines whether acquirers make better acquisition decisions when target firms' financial statements exhibit greater comparability with industry peer firms. We predict and find that acquirers make more profitable acquisition decisions when target firms' financial statements are more...

The lack of publicly available information about privately-held target firms exacerbates acquirers’ adverse selection risk in private target M&As. Although acquirers have access to inside information about the private target during the due diligence process, a number of constraints and market...

This paper examines whether mandatory accounting disclosures in financial reports impair disclosing firms' competitiveness by inducing competitors to take actions. To capture firm-level variation in product market competition, we rely on the product similarity measure developed by Hoberg and...

We analyze a procedure common in empirical accounting and finance research where researchers use ordinary least squares to decompose a dependent variable into its predicted and residual components and use the residuals as the dependent variable in a second regression. This two-step procedure is...

We investigate the impact of conditional conservation on the ability of accruals and its components to predict future cash flows. We first demonstrate that conditional conservatism has increased over the period from 1988 to 2013 due to an increase in timely loss recognition and asymmetric timely...

We analyze a procedure common in empirical accounting and finance research where researchers use ordinary least squares to decompose a dependent variable into its predicted and residual components and use the residuals as the dependent variable in a second regression. This two‐step procedure...

I use the monthly release of the Employment Situation by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to examine the impact of macroeconomic uncertainty on the pricing of firm-level earnings news. Uncertainty about employment conditions is high the day before the employment report is released and is resolved...

We examine the relation between regulatory attention and earnings management. We provide evidence that securities regulators provide most of their comment letters for new accounting standards in the first or second year of new standard effectiveness, consistent with regulators expending more...

We examine why, as a summary statistic, earnings is better than cash flows at explaining contemporaneous returns despite being a worse predictor of future operating cash flows. Several studies compare the ability of earnings and operating cash flows to predict valuation-related outcome variables...

We propose and demonstrate a new method for validating proxies for accounting constructs. Our method consists of first identifying high-value observations, which are those statistically most responsible for generating a coefficient of interest, and second determining whether those observations...