This paper develops a simple methodology based on the earnings response coefficient framework that allows decomposing realized returns into cash flow shocks and returns excluding cash flow shocks. I find that stocks with poor (good) accrual quality were on average subject to relatively lower (higher) cash flow shocks over the past 37 years. These lower (higher) cash flow shocks offset the higher (lower) expected returns of poor (good) accrual quality firms. After excluding cash flow shocks, future realized returns are negatively associated with accrual quality. The premiums pertaining to accrual quality are both statistically and economically significant in standard asset-pricing tests when cash flow shocks are excluded by firm-specific return decomposition. Overall, this paper provides evidence on the existence of a priced accrual quality risk factor, and underscores the importance of controlling for cash flow shocks in asset-pricing tests that use realized returns.

Earnings growth dispersion contains information about trends in labor reallocation, unemployment change, and, ultimately, aggregate output. We find that initial macroeconomic estimates released by government statistical agencies do not fully incorporate this information. As a consequence, earnings growth dispersion predicts future restatements in nominal and real GDP growth (and unemployment change) both in the in-sample and out-of-sample tests. Further, when we adjust GDP estimates using the out-of-sample restatement predictions, we find statistically and economically significant effects for the monetary policy prescriptions (Taylor rule) and banking regulation (Basel III).

We find evidence that equity returns increase with the propensity for tax planning in a firm's industry. This risk premium is imposed on all firms in the industry, even those that are less aggressive than their peers. The industry-based risk premium coexists with a firm-specific discount associated with active tax planning strategies that carry low systematic risk. The discount on tax planning at the firm level, however, is dwarfed by the premium on tax planning at the industry level, and is concentrated in industries that are less likely to attract scrutiny from the tax authority.

We examine the macroeconomic information content of aggregate earnings from the labor market's perspective. We use insights from the labor economics literature to characterize the information contained in aggregate GAAP earnings and its components that is relevant for predicting aggregate job creation and destruction. Our results suggest that not only does aggregate earnings news convey information about future labor market aggregates, but its information content is incremental to other macroeconomic variables at near-term horizons. Further, the source of this information stems primarily from two earnings components: aggregate core earnings and special items. Shocks to core earnings signal persistent changes in economy-wide profitability that predict aggregate job creation up to four quarters ahead, while shocks to special items predict job destruction up to one quarter. Taken together, our results suggest that aggregate earnings contain useful information about future labor market conditions, with the nature of such information varying across earnings components.

We examine the association between cost of equity and internal control weakness (ICW) for firms that filed first-time Section 404 reports with the SEC. Using several proxies, we find higher implied cost of equity associated with ICW firms than for a control sample of firms that disclosed no ICW. However, the higher cost of equity associated with ICW disappears after controlling for primitive firm characteristics and for analyst forecast bias. Overall, we find that, on average, ICWs are not directly associated with higher cost of equity.

In this paper, we use accounting fundamentals to measure systematic risk of distress. Our main testable prediction—that this risk increases with the probability of recessionary failure, P(R|F)—is based on a stylized model that guides our empirical analyses. We first apply the lasso method to select accounting fundamentals that can be combined into P(R|F) estimates. We then use the obtained estimates in asset-pricing tests. This approach successfully extracts systematic risk information from accounting data—we document a significant positive premium associated with P(R|F) estimates. The premium covaries with the news about the business cycle and aggregate failure rates. Additional tests underscore the importance of the “structure” imposed through recessionary-failure-probability estimation. The “agnostic” return predictor that relies only on past correlations between the same fundamental variables and returns exhibits markedly different properties.