Managers, security analysts, investors, and the press rely increasingly on modified definitions of GAAP net income, known by such names as “operating” and “pro forma” earnings. We document this phenomenon and discuss competing explanations for the recent rise in the use of such modified earnings numbers and implications for the interpretation of related accounting research. Our results show that over the past 20 years there has been a dramatic increase in the frequency and magnitude of cases where “GAAP” and “Street” earnings differ. Further, there is a very strong bias toward the reporting of a Street earnings number that exceeds the GAAP earnings number. We also show that the market response to the Street earnings number has displaced GAAP earnings as a primary determinant of stock prices. Finally, through an analysis of earnings releases, we show that management has taken a proactive role in defining and emphasizing the Street number when communicating to analysts and investors.

Patricia M. Dechow, Amy P. Hutton, Richard G. Sloan, Economic Consequences of Accounting for Stock-Based Compensation, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 34, Studies on Recognition, Measurement, and Disclosure Issues in Accounting (1996), pp. 1-20

Prior research shows that the cash component of earnings is more persistent than the accrual component. We decompose the cash component into: (1) the change in the cash balance, (2) issuances/distributions to debt, and (3) issuances/distributions to equity. We find that the higher persistence of the cash component is entirely due to the subcomponent related to equity. The other subcomponents have persistence levels almost identical to accruals. We investigate whether investors understand the implications of the differential persistence of the three subcomponents. Our results suggest that investors correctly price debt and equity issuances/distributions but misprice the change in the cash balance in a similar manner to accruals. Our tests enable us to empirically distinguish the “accrual” and “external financing” anomalies with results implying that the accrual anomaly subsumes the external financing anomaly. Our results also suggest that naive fixation on earnings is unlikely to be a complete explanation for the accrual anomaly. Our findings are more consistent with investors misunderstanding diminishing returns to new investments.

Existing research indicates that firms with high accruals are more likely to experience future earnings problems, but that investors' expectations, as reflected in stock prices, do not appear to anticipate these problems. In this paper, we directly examine the published opinions of two types of professional investor intermediaries to see if they provide investors with information concerning the future earnings problems experienced by firms with high accruals. First, we examine the earnings forecasts of sell‐side analysts. We show that analysts' earnings forecasts do not incorporate the predictable future earnings declines associated with high accruals. Second, we examine the behavior of independent auditors. We find no evidence that auditors signal the future earnings problems associated with high accruals through either their audit opinions or through auditor changes. Overall, our evidence indicates that analysts and auditors do not alert investors to the future earnings problems associated with high accruals, thus corroborating previous findings that investors do not appear to anticipate these problems.

This paper provides a new approach to test for accrual‐based earnings management. Our approach exploits the inherent property of accrual accounting that any accrual‐based earnings management in one period must reverse in another period. If the researcher has priors concerning the timing of the reversal, incorporating these priors can significantly improve the power and specification of tests for earnings management. Our results indicate that tests incorporating reversals increase test power by around 40% and provide a robust solution for mitigating model misspecification arising from correlated omitted variables.

Implied equity duration was originally developed to analyze the sensitivity of equity prices to discount rate changes. We demonstrate that implied equity duration is also useful for analyzing the sensitivity of equity prices to pandemic shutdowns. Pandemic shutdowns primarily impact short‐term cash flows, thus they have a greater impact on low‐duration equities. We show that implied equity duration has a strong positive relation to U.S. equity returns and analyst forecast revisions during the onset of the 2020 COVID‐19 shutdown. Our analysis also demonstrates that the underperformance of “value” stocks during this period is a rational response to their lower durations.