Knowledge that Transforms

The paper examines the determinants and performance consequences of equity grants to senior-level executives, lower-level managers, and non-exempt employees of “new economy” firms. We find that the determinants of equity grants are significantly different in new versus old economy firms. We also find that employee retention objectives, which new economy firms rank as the most important goal of their equity grant programs, have a significant impact on new hire grants, but not subsequent grants. Our exploratory performance tests indicate that lower than expected grants and/or existing holdings of options are associated with poorer performance in subsequent years.

By analyzing a carefully constructed earnings announcements sample that discloses a ‘pro forma’ earnings number, Bhattacharya et al. (J. Account. Econom. 36 (1–3) (2003)) contribute to recent research documenting increasing differences between earnings as defined by generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and alternative earnings definitions followed by capital markets. The paper provides interesting descriptive data on pro forma earnings per share relative to both GAAP earnings per share and actual earnings per share as tracked by I/B/E/S. Also, the authors conduct tests of the relative informativeness and persistence of these three earnings measures. Econometric and data limitations inhibit the inferences that can be drawn from some of these tests.

This paper examines the ability of financial statement measures of average and marginal tax rates (MTR) to capture tax attributes utilizing firm-level tax and financial data. The results suggest commonly used average tax rate measures provide little insight about statutory tax burdens, and may introduce substantial bias into analyses of tax incidence. Financial statement-based proxies for MTR, particularly those based on simulation methods, are found to perform well in estimating current year tax rates. Both current year and present value MTR are found to be highly correlated with an easily constructed binary proxy of firms’ tax status.

Multiple-performance-measure agency models predict that optimal contracts should place greater reliance on performance measures that are more precise and more sensitive to the agent's effort. We apply these predictions to CEO retention decisions. First, we develop an agency model to motivate proxies for signal and noise in firm-level performance measures. We then document that accounting information appears to receive greater weight in turnover decisions when accounting-based measures are more precise and more sensitive. We also present evidence suggesting that market-based performance measures receive less weight in turnover decisions when accounting-based measures are more sensitive or market returns are more variable.

Ball, Robin and Wu (Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2003, this issue) investigate the relationship between accounting standards and the structure of other institutions on the attributes of the financial reporting system. They find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that beyond accounting standards, the structure of other institutions, such as incentives of preparers and auditors, enforcement mechanisms and ownership structure affects the outcome of the financial reporting system. However, interpretation of the evidence with respect to the notion of quality of the financial reporting system and the quality of accounting standards that the authors introduce is problematic.

During Spring 2000, the Internet Stock Index declined 45%. Using a sample of internet firms, this paper investigates whether this decline was associated with new disclosures, such as earnings, analyst forecast revisions, and web-traffic measures, or to a “reassessment” by investors of pre-existing information. We find only modest evidence that the decline was associated with new disclosures. However, returns and post-decline stock prices are significantly explained by 1999 annual report data. When earnings are decomposed into gross profit and various expenses, traditional financial information contributes significantly more in explaining the cross-sectional returns and price levels than non-financial information.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the model used by Harris and Kemsley (J. Acc. Res. 37 (1999) 275), Harris et al. (J. Public Econ. 79 (2001) 569) and Collins and Kemsley (Acc. Rev. 75 (2000) 405), hereafter CHHK, and to investigate their empirical results. We demonstrate that the model underlying CHHK is flawed, and show that their interpretation of the data is incorrect. Finally, we find that after controlling for market to book ratio, Harris and Kemsley's first main result vanishes. In total, we reject CHHK's conclusions that equity prices are discounted for shareholder dividend taxes on retained earnings.

Existing studies on the value-relevance of R&D tend to overstate the R&D benefits and shed little light on the trade-off between the R&D benefits (mean effect) and their riskiness (variance effect). This study shows that the variance effect of R&D is on average more significant than their mean effect in bond valuation. Hence, for creditors, the R&D risk dominates their benefits. Furthermore, this study documents that R&D measures alone explain approximately 80% of cross-sectional variations in bond ratings and risk premium. These findings contribute to the debate over R&D accounting and the bond pricing literature.

We find that a firm's dividend yield has a positive impact on its common stock return that is decreasing in the level of institutional and corporate ownership, our indicator of whether the marginal investor in a firm's common stock is more likely to be a low-tax or a high-tax investor. These results suggest that (1) a dividend tax penalty is incorporated into the return on a firm's common stock and (2) both a firm's dividend policy and its ownership structure impact the size of the dividend tax penalty.

The extensive literature that investigates whether analysts’ earnings forecasts are biased and/or inefficient has produced conflicting evidence and no definitive answers to either question. This paper shows how two relatively small but statistically influential asymmetries in the tail and the middle of distributions of analysts’ forecast errors can exaggerate or obscure evidence consistent with analyst bias and inefficiency, leading to inconsistent inferences. We identify an empirical link between firms’ recognition of unexpected accruals and the presence of the two asymmetries in distributions of forecast errors that suggests that firm reporting choices play an important role in determining analysts’ forecast errors.