A two-date rational expectations model is analyzed. At the first date, traders can privately acquire a costly signal that provides imperfect information about a public report that will be issued at the second date. Equilibrium characterizations are provided for the fraction of traders that become informed and the informativeness of the first-date price, as well as the price change variance and the expected trading volume at the second date. Comparative statics identify how the above variables are influenced by changes in the information content of the public report, and in particular how market phenomena at the public release date are influenced by endogenous prior information acquisition and trading in response to the forthcoming public release.

This study reexamines competition, cost structure, and growth opportunities effects on earnings response coefficients and extends this literature in several ways. First, it presents a more refined theoretical motivation for investigating competition and cost structure effects. Second, it introduces new economic factor proxies that confirm prior findings with respect to competition but differ from prior findings with respect to cost structure and growth opportunities. Overall the evidence suggests that accounting earnings reflect information about future economic rents generated by firms' assets-in-place. The evidence also suggests, contrary to prior studies, that accounting earnings are not very informative about firms' growth opportunities.

Multi-bank holding companies file detailed financial statements on their subsidiary banks. The availability of these data allows for an empirical examination of the relation between accounting-based performance and personnel decision for lower-level managers. For our sample of Texas banks, we find that turnover of subsidiary bank managers is negatively related to subsidiary performance, while promotions are positively related to performance. Holding own-bank performance constant, turnover increases with holding-company performance, which is consistent with the view that turnover decisions are based on performance relative to a firm-specification benchmark.

We assess earning's lack of timeliness and value-irrelavant noise in earnings as explanations for the weak contemporaneous return-earnings assocation. Earnings lack timeliness because objectivity, verifiability, and conservatism conventions underlie the accounting measurement process. Noise in earnings is uncorrelated with returns in all periods. It likely gets introduced when estimates of future cash flows that differ from the market's estimates are included in earnings determined by accounting rules. Consistent with earning lacking timeliness, we find current and future earnings adjusted for expectational errors explain roughly 3–6 times as much of the annual return variation as current earnings alone.