Knowledge that Transforms

This paper examines the market pricing of Jones (1991) modelestimated abnormal accruals (often termed “discretionary accruals” in the prior literature) to test whether stock prices rationally reflect the one-year-ahead earnings implications of these accruals. Using the Mishkin (1983) and hedge-portfolio test methods Sloan (1996) employs, I find that the market overestimates the persistence, or one-year-ahead earnings implications, of abnormal accruals, and consequently overprices these accruals. These results extend Subramanyam (1996) by demonstrating that the market not only prices, but also overprices abnormal accruals. They also suggest that the overpricing of total accruals that Sloan (1996) documents is due largely to abnormal accruals. The results are robust to five alternative measures of abnormal accruals, and still hold when I estimate abnormal accruals after controlling for major unusual but largely nondiscretionary accruals. The latter finding is consistent with the notion that the market overprices the portion of abnormal accruals stemming from managerial discretion.

This paper examines the extent to which accounting systems separately identify all the costs of environmental regulation. We estimate the relation between the “visible” costs of regulatory compliance (costs that firms' accounting systems correctly classify as “environmental”) and “hidden” environmental costs embedded in other accounts. We use plant-level data from 55 steel mills to estimate hidden costs, and we follow up with structured interviews of corporate-level managers and plant-level accountants. Empirical results show that a $1 increase in the visible cost of environmental regulation is associated with an increase in total cost (at the margin) of 10–11, of which 9–10 are hidden in other accounts. The findings suggest that inappropriate identification and accumulation of the costs of environmental compliance are likely to distort costs in firms subject to environmental regulation.

This study examines how client risk factors and the provision of additional services affect engagement planning and bid pricing for a set of initial engagement proposals that a single firm submitted to its prospective clients in 1997–1998. We find little effect of risk on planned personnel hours, but show that the firm responds to fraud and error risk factors by applying engagement-planning strategies such as assigning more high-risk specialist personnel, assigning more industry expert personnel, applying more intensive testing, and/or performing additional review. Analyzing proposed fees while controlling for planned personnel hours, we find risk premia for both fraud and error risk factors. Supplemental analysis of accepted vs. rejected bids shows that the risk premia are detectable for bids accepted by clients (i.e., the engagements the firm will actually perform), implying that risk premia are not bid away in the market. We also find that for clients purchasing additional services, the firm plans more hours and uses industry experts more often. Results reveal a relatively small fee premium for additional services clients across all bids, but analysis of accepted vs. rejected bids implies that this premium is bid away in the market.

This paper documents that the weighting of analysts' annual earnings forecasts implicit in security prices is lower than the historical relation between financial analysts' forecasts and realized earnings. Short positions in securities in the bottom decile and long positions in the top decile of the crosssectional distribution of analysts' early-in-the-year earnings forecasts generate significant hedge-portfolio returns in the year after portfolio formation. This delayed price response is more pronounced for firms with relatively low analyst coverage, consistent with the premise that low financial analyst coverage is associated with a variety of factors that impede the information efficiency of the security market. The hedge-portfolio returns concentrate in the months of subsequent quarterly earnings announcements, suggesting that the delayed security price adjustments reflect the market's failure to incorporate information in analysts' forecasts about future earnings, rather than deficiencies in our conditional expectations of security returns.

We investigate the effects of missing quarterly earnings benchmarks on the CEO's annual bonus. After controlling for the general pay-for-performance relation, we find a significant incremental adverse effect on CEO annual cash bonuses when the firm's quarterly earnings fall short of the consensus analyst forecast or the earnings for the same quarter of the prior year, for at least two quarters during the year. However, we find that the relation between the bonus and the number of loss quarters is not significant. Our results suggest that CEO bonus payments provide CEOs with economic incentives to meet quarterly analyst earnings forecasts and earnings from the same quarter of the prior year.

In this study we examine whether banks owned by interstate multibank holding companies coordinate their security gains and losses to manage their tax, earnings, and capital management objectives. Specifically, we examine whether the realization of security gains and losses is related to the objectives of the individual bank, the consolidated group, or both. We find subsidiary banks manage their gain realizations not only to reduce their own state taxes, but also strategically to reduce their consolidated groups' tax expense. Specifically, members of consolidated banking groups shift gain recognition to lower-taxed group members and away from higher-taxed group members. In addition, we find evidence suggesting that banks realize security gains and losses to manage both their own and their groups' financial statement earnings.

This study empirically investigates how taxes affect managerial compensation for a sample of privately held insurers whose managers own a large percentage of the firm's stock (I refer to these as management-owned insurers) during 1989–1996. Shareholder/managers receive two types of income from the firm they own: compensation income as employees, and investment income as shareholders. Although compensation income is taxable to employees and deductible by employers, investment income is subject to double taxation. Thus, the mix of the two is an important tax-planning decision for management-owned insurers. I predict and find that as individual tax rates increased relative to corporate tax rates from 1989–1992 to 1993–1996, shareholder/managers paid themselves less tax-deductible compensation relative to a control sample of nonmanagement-owned insurers (i.e., privately held insurers with no managerial ownership). The study's results expand our understanding of management-owned, privately held firms' tax-planning strategies, and have implications for the efficiency of the federal income tax system.

I present evidence consistent with managers using derivatives and discretionary accruals as partial substitutes for smoothing earnings. Using 1994–1996 data for a sample of Fortune 500 firms, I estimate a set of simultaneous equations that captures managers' incentives to maintain a desired level of earnings volatility through hedging and accrual management. These incentives include increasing managerial compensation and wealth, reducing corporate income taxes and debt financing costs, avoiding underinvestment and earnings surprises, and mitigating volatility caused by low diversification. After controlling for such incentives, I find a significant negative association between derivatives' notional amounts and proxies for the magnitude of discretionary accruals.

This study provides evidence that hyperlinking a firm's audited financial statements to unaudited information in a web-based environment leads investors to blend the unaudited information with the audited statements. I obtain evidence of this blending effect using an experiment where investors assessed a firm's earnings potential by evaluating the firm's audited financial statements and a subsequent optimistic unaudited letter to shareholders from the firm's management. Investors who viewed hyperlinked materials on the Web misclassified more unaudited information as audited and assessed the credibility of the unaudited information as higher than did investors who viewed hardcopy materials. Those investors who assessed the unaudited information as more credible also judged the firm's earnings potential to be higher. Notifying users with an “AUDITED/NOT AUDITED” label attenuated these effects. This evidence suggests that firms can influence financial report users' perceptions by hyperlinking unaudited information to information in their audited financial statements, and that a simple disclosure rule reduces this influence.

Building on the Dechow et al. (1998) model of the accrual process, this study investigates the role of accruals in predicting future cash flows. The model shows that each accrual component reflects different information relating to future cash flows; aggregate earnings masks this information. As predicted, disaggregating accruals into major components—change in accounts receivable, change in accounts payable, change in inventory, depreciation, amortization, and other accruals—significantly enhances predictive ability. Each accrual component, including depreciation and amortization, is significant with the predicted sign in predicting future cash flows, incremental to current cash flow. The cash flow and accrual components of current earnings have substantially more predictive ability for future cash flows than several lags of aggregate earnings. The inferences are robust to alternative specifications, including controlling for operating cash cycle and industry membership.