Examines the economic rationale of the low-balling practice in audit pricing. Analysis of the practice using experimental economic methodology; Testing of low-balling under different conditions of transaction costs.
This paper examines the relation between stock returns and accounting earnings under the assumption that the market observes current-period information other than earnings. This assumption is motivated by existing empirical evidence that stock returns lead accounting earnings. The analysis shows that the returns-earnings relation depends on the relative ability of earnings versus alternative information to predict future earnings as well as the time-series persistence of earnings. Assuming that the researcher does not observe the alternative information, the earnings response coefficient should be increasing both in the ability of past earnings to predict future earnings and in earnings persistence. The variance of stock price changes during the announcement of earnings should be decreasing in predictability and increasing in persistence. Empirical tests of these four hypotheses are generally consistent with the theory. Also discussed is how the assumption of alternative information may be useful in examining the information environment hypothesis, in assessing ad hoc methods of reducing measurement error bias, and in formulating how economic earnings differ from accounting earnings.
Describes an experiment that examines the effects of managers' perceptions of internal and external auditing on the potential commission of financial reporting irregularities. Deterrence effects of internal and external auditing; Use of quantitative randomized technique.
Reexamines the impact of merger accounting method by using a sample of tax-free mergers drawn from a different time period and using more refined cumulative average residual methodology. Nonmerger-related capital asset pricing model; Postmerger indirect cash-flow impacts.
This paper presents a partially revealing rational expectations model of competitive trading to identify two effects of information releases; an informedness effect and a consensus effect. The informedness effect measures the extent to which agents become more knowledgeable, and the consensus effect measures the extent of agreement among agents at the time of an information release. We demonstrate that informedness and consensus generally occur jointly when information is disseminated, and that unexpected price changes and trading volume are each influenced by both informedness and consensus. Thus, interpretations of unexpected price changes and volume associated with information releases are conceptually similar. Since informedness and consensus each affect both the variance of price changes and volume, our paper provides an economic rationale for examining both price and volume effects at the time of information releases.