Despite a belief among corporate executives that smooth earnings paths lead to a lower cost of equity capital, I find no relation between earnings smoothness and average stock returns over the last 30 years. In other words, owners of firms with volatile earnings are not compensated with higher returns, as one would expect if volatile earnings lead to greater risk exposure. Although prior empirical work links smoother earnings to a lower implied cost of capital, I offer evidence that this link is driven primarily by optimism in analysts' long-term earnings forecasts. This optimism yields target prices and implied cost of capital estimates that are systematically too high for firms with volatile earnings. Overall, the evidence is inconsistent with the notion that attempts to smooth earnings can lead to a lower cost of equity capital.

When analysts provide forecasts of both earnings and operating cash flow, they also implicitly provide a forecast of total operating accruals. We posit that this increases the transparency and the expected costs of accrual manipulations used to manage earnings. As a consequence, we predict and find that accrual quality improves and firms’ propensity to meet or beat earnings benchmarks declines following the provision of cash flow forecasts. We also predict and find that firms turn to other benchmark-beating mechanisms, such as real activities manipulation and earnings guidance in response to the provision of cash flow forecasts.

Short interest is currently required to be disclosed twice per month, but regulators have sought to increase this frequency. Meanwhile, short interest information from private third‐party vendors has emerged to meet investor demand on a daily basis. We find that daily private‐sector data strongly predict bimonthly regulatory disclosure. Furthermore, private‐sector data help price discovery, albeit with modest economic magnitude. Investors tend to underreact to the information content of private‐sector data mainly due to limits to arbitrage rather than market inattention. Despite the costly access to private‐sector data, we find no evidence that retail investors are harmed in their trades. Overall, our findings highlight the interplay between private‐sector and regulatory solutions in enhancing financial market transparency.

Dichev and Tang (2008) document a dramatic decrease over the last 40 years in the contemporaneous correlation between revenue and expense, along with an associated increase in earnings volatility and a decline in earnings persistence, suggesting a decline in earnings quality. We document that these changes are primarily attributable to an increase in the incidence of large special items. We then examine the extent to which this increase in special items is due to either more frequent real economic events related to special item recognition or to the adoption of new accounting standards. Our evidence suggests that changes in the frequency of economic events associated with special items have played a more important and sustained role relative to the role played by adoption of individual accounting standards. Finally, we find that the changing incidence of these economic events is at least in part related to the well-documented increase in competition in the U.S. economy over the last four decades.

A heated debate exists as to whether discontinuities in earnings distributions are indicative of earnings management. While many studies attribute discontinuities in earnings distributions to earnings management, other studies argue that earnings discontinuities are artifacts of sample selection and research design. Overall, there is limited direct evidence of a connection between earnings discontinuities and earnings management. In this study, we provide direct evidence linking earnings management to earnings discontinuities for a sample of firms that settle securities class action lawsuits and restate earnings from the alleged GAAP violation period. We compare the distribution of restated (“unmanaged”) earnings to originally reported (“managed”) earnings. We find that discontinuities are not present in the distribution of analyst forecast errors and earnings changes using unmanaged earnings but are present using managed earnings. The discontinuity in the earnings level distribution is attenuated, but not eliminated, on an unmanaged basis. These shifts among our sample of firms are caused by earnings management and cannot be explained by sample selection or research design issues. Our findings are important because many studies use earnings discontinuities as a proxy for intentional earnings manipulations and we provide the first direct evidence of a link between these two phenomena.