Recent accounting and finance literature has introduced the term returns synchronicity, the relation of firm-specific returns to market-wide and industry-wide returns. This paper evaluates the power of fundamental synchronicity, proxied by financial accounting performance measures, to explain...

This paper reassesses evidence of anticipatory income smoothing reported in DeFond and Park (1997) in light of knowledge about the shortcomings in the model used to identify the managed component of reported earnings. Our tests demonstrate that the empirical results reported in DeFond and Park...

In this paper, we examine the relation between the inadequate levels of capital during the recent financial crisis and the shareholder dividend and stock repurchase activities in the banking industry. In 2008, the Treasury Department initiated a bailout of the banking industry through the...

We examine how firms exercise reporting discretion when preparing the performance graph required under the SEC's new compensation disclosure rules. Results from a sample of 449 Samp;P 500 firms, 31.4% of whom self-constructed a peer group, indicate that three sets of factors -- the firm's...

This study uses publicly-available information to examine the information content of executive-created Grantor Retained Annuity Trusts (GRATs) using executive corporate stock. GRATs have the potential to transfer excess returns tax-free to beneficiaries and hence many GRATs may be funded with...

We examine whether the recent public outcry over executive compensation has had an impact on the level of executive compensation and/or the sensitivity of cash compensation to firm performance. Cross-sectional analyses for a sample of 186 firms show that post-1993 compensation levels have risen...

Economists and political scientists have long been interested in factors that affect the statutory tax rate on businesses set by federal governments. In this study, we examine the impact of political and economic factors on several measures of tax rates and tax incentives offered across 19...

This paper documents that the weighting of analysts' annual earnings forecasts implicit in security prices is lower than the historical relation between financial analysts' forecasts and realized earnings. Short positions in securities in the bottom decile and long positions in the top decile of...

This paper re-examines Ou's [1990] finding that Pr-estimates, summary measures derived from non-earnings financial accounting variables, are useful in predicting future earnings changes and in explaining the security market's valuation of contemporary earnings changes. Our empirical results...