ABSTRACT Online financial communities provide a unique opportunity to directly examine individual investors' attention to accounting information on a large scale and in great detail. I analyze accounting‐related content in large samples of Yahoo! message board posts and StockTwits and find investors pay attention to a range of accounting information, fixating particularly on earnings, cash, and revenues. Consistent with the expectation that investors react to relevant information events, I find accounting‐related discussion elevated around the filings of earnings releases and 8‐K reports, but the reaction to periodic reports is confined to small firms. I also find investors expand their acquisition of accounting information and processing efforts in poor information environments. Greater attention to accounting information at earnings releases does not appear to be meaningfully associated with better information processing.

ABSTRACT Stakeholders in the Chapter 11 reorganization process face significant information uncertainty about the post‐emergence prospects of the firm. The U.S. Bankruptcy Code requires a debtor to provide a disclosure statement containing “adequate information” about its financial status and a proposed reorganization plan but stops short of rigidly defining the adequacy standard. We document the heterogeneity in disclosure statement information across 16 distinct attributes and examine the variation in disclosures along several dimensions that reflect agency costs and coordination problems. We observe that Chapter 11 disclosure correlates more with claimant‐ and case‐specific characteristics than pre‐bankruptcy debtor characteristics. Our results illustrate the importance of institutional features in specific disclosure settings such as bankruptcy court filings. The research questions and methods of this study were registered via the Journal of Accounting Research ’s registration‐based editorial process.

ABSTRACT A fundamental property of accrual accounting is to smooth temporary timing fluctuations in operating cash flows, indicating an inherent negative correlation between accruals and cash flows. We show that the overall correlation between accruals and cash flows has dramatically declined in magnitude over the past half century and has largely disappeared in more recent years. The adjusted R 2 from regressing (changes in) accruals on (changes in) cash flows drops from about 70% (90%) in the 1960s to near zero (under 20%) in more recent years. In exploring potential reasons for the observed attenuation, we find that increases in non‐timing‐related accrual recognition, as proxied by one‐time and nonoperating items and the frequency of loss firm‐years, explain the majority of the overall decline. On the other hand, temporal changes in the matching between revenues and expenses, and the growth of intangible‐intensive industries play only a limited role in explaining the observed attenuation. Finally, the relative decline of the timing role of accruals does not appear to be associated with an increase in the asymmetrically timely loss recognition role.

We show that the vast majority of investors ignore value-relevant accruals information when it is first released, but that investors who initiate trades of at least 5,000 shares tend to transact in the proper direction. These investors trade on accruals information only when the previously-announced earnings signal is non-negative. Unconditionally, those investors initiating the smallest trades appear to respond to accruals in the wrong direction, but further investigation suggests this behavior is explained by their attraction to attention-grabbing stocks. Finally, we find that those who trade on accruals information have insufficient market power to mitigate the accruals anomaly.