This paper presents a statistical procedure to identify effects of three potential structural changes on accounting earnings – temporary, short-run, and long-run. The procedure is applied to quarterly accounting earnings of 39 utility companies. Structural changes are found to be commonplace. Statistical forecasting models that explicitly incorporate structural change effects are found to generate more accurate forecasts than other statistical models in the literature. Although no statistical model significantly dominates Value Line, a firm-specific model with structural change adjustment forecasts as well as Value Line. Moreover, all statistical models examined have significant marginal forecasting power to complement Value Line forecasts.

The wisdom of crowds suggests that groups with more diversely informed individuals reach more informed decisions because their members are collectively more knowledgeable. I study this idea in the context of the market's response to earnings announcements by examining how information diversity across investors affects the efficiency of the price response to earnings news. I measure investors' information diversity based on their geographic dispersion, which I estimate using the locations of the requests for firms' filings to EDGAR. Greater geographic dispersion is associated with greater trading during the announcement period; this supports the use of geographic dispersion as a measure of information diversity. Consistent with my predictions, the price response to a firm's earnings news is more efficient when the firm's investors have greater information diversity. In further analysis, I find that the initial heightened trading for firms with more diversely informed investors subsides quickly after the announcement period.

While firm-initiated compensation recovery (or clawback) provisions are gaining popularity and the recently enacted Dodd-Frank Act seeks to make the clawback of erroneously awarded compensation mandatory for all listed companies, little is known about their effectiveness. We find that the incidence of accounting restatements declines after firms initiate such provisions. In addition, we show that investors and auditors view such provisions as associated with increased accounting quality and lower audit risk. Specifically, we find that firms' earnings response coefficients increase after the adoption of clawback provisions. Further, for firms that adopt clawbacks, auditors are less likely to report material internal control weaknesses, charge lower audit fees, and issue audit reports with a shorter lag.

Applying a difference-in-differences approach to explore variations in the timing of bank mergers in the U.S. over the last two decades, we document an increase in borrowers’ disclosure when their banks engage in mergers and acquisitions. The effect is stronger among borrowers more reliant on services from the merging banks and when mergers cause larger changes in banks’ monitoring and financing of borrowers. These findings suggest an information spillover effect from bank mergers to the public financial markets, and have implications for how changes in banking markets affect the availability of public disclosure in the stock markets.

This paper provides theory and evidence showing how accounting variables explain cross-sectional stock returns. Based on Zhang, G. [2000. Accounting information, capital investment decisions, and equity valuation: theory and empirical implications. Journal of Accounting Research 38, 271–295], who relates equity value to accounting measures of underlying operations, we derive returns as a function of earnings yield, equity capital investment, and changes in profitability, growth opportunities, and discount rates. Empirical results confirm the predicted roles of all identified factors. The model explains about 20% of the cross-sectional return variation, with cash-flow-related factors (as opposed to changes in discount rates) accounting for most of the explanatory power. The properties of the model are robust across various subsamples and periods.

Given the recent controversy over deviations of street earnings from GAAP earnings, we show that the nonrecurring items that analysts include in street earnings are more persistent and have higher valuation multiples than those items they exclude from street earnings. In addition, we find no evidence that the pricing differential between the included and excluded items leads to future abnormal returns. If, as analysts claim, the primary use of street earnings is to value a stock, then our results suggest that analysts do have expertise in processing earnings information and that certain items appear justifiably excluded.

Heater, Nallareddy, and Venkatachalam (2021), hereafter HNV, find that aggregate merger and acquisition (M&A) activity explains the ability of aggregate accruals to predict market-wide returns. In this discussion, we delineate HNV's contribution to accounting literature and provide a review of the emerging stream of micro-to-macro accounting research. We also discuss HNV's findings in relation to research beyond accounting, including the literature on aggregate return prediction and mergers and acquisitions. Our discussion draws parallels between HNV's results and prior empirical evidence pertaining to aggregate investment and merger waves and identifies several puzzling inconsistencies. These inconsistencies highlight the lack of a clearly specified mechanism behind the return-predictive ability of aggregate M&A accruals. Finally, we point out the challenges posed by the small sample size and noisy measures of M&A accruals that may affect HNV's inferences. We conclude by suggesting several directions for future research.

Harris and O'Brien (2018) investigate whether U.S. tax policy distorts U.S. multinationals’ (MNCs) investment. They find that MNCs facing higher repatriation tax costs engage in fewer domestic acquisitions. The study re-examines the results in two prior studies that found no effect (Hanlon et al. 2015) and a positive effect (Martin et al. 2015) by introducing a new proxy for repatriation tax costs: A binary variable for whether the MNC uses the Double Irish structure. We critique the theory underlying the prediction as well as the proxy. We conclude that caution should be exercised in taking the results at face value.

The municipal bond market has long been criticized for its lack of disclosure, which prior research often attributes to weak regulatory oversight. We offer another explanation: tax clienteles. Most municipal bonds are tax-exempt, and thus primarily attract high-tax retail investors, who may lack the incentive or ability to demand or monitor disclosures. In contrast, taxable bonds attract a broader investor base, including institutional investors who can demand disclosure. We find that issuers provide more continuing disclosures in years with taxable bonds outstanding relative to years without. Issuers also increase disclosures after issuing their first taxable bond and decrease disclosures after calling their last taxable bond. Exploiting a tax law change, we find that disclosures increase following plausibly exogenous increases in taxable bond issuances. Our results suggest that the tax clienteles for municipal bonds affect issuers’ disclosure practices and can inform those concerned with disclosure noncompliance in the municipal bond market.

We investigate firms that stop providing earnings guidance (“stoppers”) either by publicly announcing their decision (“announcers”) or doing so quietly (“quiet stoppers”). Relative to firms that continue guiding, stoppers have poorer prior performance, more uncertain operating environments, and fewer informed investors. Announcers commit to non-disclosure because they (i) do not expect to report future good news or (ii) have lower incentives to guide due to the presence of long-term investors. The three-day return around the announcement is negative. Stoppers subsequently experience increases in analyst forecast dispersion and decreases in forecast accuracy but no change in return volatility or analyst following.