Anilowski, Feng and Skinner (Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2006, this issue) examine the relationship between aggregate earnings guidance, aggregate earnings news and market returns. They provide evidence that changes in aggregate proportions of downward or upward earnings guidance are associated with aggregate earnings news and weakly associated with market returns. However, the study is unable to establish causality or the precise nature of the relationship between aggregate earnings guidance and market returns. To better understand the relationship, this paper analyzes the relation between aggregate earnings, stock market returns and the macroeconomy. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research.

I examine earnings management around seasoned equity offerings and, consistent with Rangan (J. Financial Econ. 50 (1998) 101) and Teoh et al. (J. Financial Econ. 50 (1998) 63), find evidence of earnings management around the offerings. However, in contrast to their conclusions, I show that investors infer earnings management and rationally undo its effects at equity offering announcements. The investor naı̈veté conclusion of Teoh et al. (J. Financial Econ. 50 (1998) 63) and Rangan (J. Financial Econ. 50 (1998) 101) appears to be due to test misspecification. I conclude that seasoned equity issuers’ earnings management may not be designed to mislead investors, but may merely reflect the issuers’ rational response to anticipated market behavior at offering announcements.

We show that, contrary to popular belief, initial public offering (IPO) firms report more conservatively. We attribute this to the higher quality reporting demanded of public firms by financial statement users and consequentially higher monitoring by auditors, boards, analysts, rating agencies, press, and litigants, and to greater regulatory scrutiny [Ball, R., Shivakumar, L., 2005. Earnings quality in UK private firms: comparative loss recognition timeliness. Journal of Accounting and Economics 39, 83–128]. We also question the evidence of Teoh et al. [1998b. Earnings management and the subsequent market performance of initial public offerings. Journal of Finance 53, 1935–1974] supporting the alternative hypothesis that managers opportunistically inflate earnings to influence IPO pricing. We conjecture that upward-biased estimates of “discretionary” accruals occur in a broad genre of studies on earnings management around similar large transactions and events.

UK private and public companies face substantially equivalent regulation on auditing, accounting standards and taxes. We hypothesize that private company financial reporting nevertheless is of lower quality due to different market demand, regulation notwithstanding. A large UK sample supports this hypothesis. Quality is operationalized using Basu's (1997) time-series measure of timely loss recognition and a new accruals-based method. The result is not affected by controls for size, leverage, industry membership and auditor size, or by allowing endogenous listing choice. The result enhances understanding of private companies, which are predominant in the economy. It also provides insight into the economics of accounting standards.

We investigate the role of accrual accounting in the asymmetrically timely recognition (incorporation in reported earnings) of gains and losses. Timely recognition requires accruals when it precedes complete realization of the gains and losses in cash. We show that nonlinear accruals models incorporating the asymmetry in gain and loss recognition (timelier loss recognition, or conditional conservatism) offer a substantial specification improvement, explaining substantially more variation in accruals than equivalent linear specifications. Conversely, conventional linear accruals models, by omitting the loss recognition asymmetry, exhibit substantial attenuation bias and offer a comparatively poor specification of the accounting accrual process. Linear specifications also understate the ability of current earnings to predict future cash flows. These findings have implications for our understanding of accrual accounting and conservatism, as well as for researchers estimating discretionary accruals, earnings management, and earnings quality.

This paper examines whether earnings momentum and price momentum are related. Both in time-series as well as in cross-sectional asset pricing tests, we find that price momentum is captured by the systematic component of earnings momentum. The predictive power of past returns is subsumed by a zero-investment portfolio that is long on stocks with high earnings surprises and short on stocks with low earnings surprises. Further, returns to the earnings-based zero-investment portfolio are significantly related to future macroeconomic activities, including growth in GDP, industrial production, consumption, labor income, inflation, and T-bill returns.

Ronald W. Masulis, Lakshmanan Shivakumar, Does Market Structure Affect the Immediacy of Stock Price Responses to News?, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Dec., 2002), pp. 617-648

We propose two explanations for the previously documented relation between aggregate earnings growth and future inflation: one based on firms changing their investment in response to earnings growth, and the other based on consumers varying their consumption in response to wealth effects of profitability growth. As the supply of goods and services is relatively inelastic in the short run, our arguments imply that changes to near-term demand for investment (consumption) will affect the prices of investment (consumption) goods and services. Consistent with the investment-based argument, we find that profitability changes predict investment and Producer Price Index (PPI) shifts in subsequent quarters. Our analyses also reveal that aggregate earnings growth predicts future investment and PPI forecast errors. We find, at best, weak evidence for the consumption-based link between aggregate earnings growth and future inflation.

A growing number of researchers argue that time‐series patterns in returns are due to investor irrationality and thus can be translated into abnormal profits. Continuation of short‐term returns or momentum is one such pattern that has defied any rational explanation and is at odds with market efficiency. This paper shows that profits to momentum strategies can be explained by a set of lagged macroeconomic variables and payoffs to momentum strategies disappear once stock returns are adjusted for their predictability based on these macroeconomic variables. Our results provide a possible role for time‐varying expected returns as an explanation for momentum payoffs.