We contrast the informativeness of earnings and dividends for firms with dual class and single class ownership structures. Results of both across-sample tests (which explicitly control for factors influencing ownership structure and informativeness) and within-sample tests (which implicitly control for factors associated with ownership structure) show that earnings are generally less informative, and dividends are at least as (if not more) informative, for dual class firms. We interpret these results as suggesting that the net effect of dual class structures is to reduce the credibility of earnings and to enhance the salience of dividends as measures of performance.

We investigate whether competing information, primarily analyst reports, reduces the usefulness of earnings announcements. Inconsistent with the view that information in analyst reports substitutes for earnings announcements, we find a positive relation between absolute abnormal returns to the two types of disclosures. This positive relation also characterizes subsequent period analyst reports relative to current period earnings announcements. We also find that aggregate absolute reactions to both types of disclosures increased over 1986–1995. As a whole, these results provide little support for the view that the informativeness of earnings announcements is eroded by competing information in the form of analyst reports.

Abstract We analyze the ability of earnings and non‐earnings performance metrics to explain the variability in annual stock returns for industries where we identify, ex ante, an allegedly preferred (for valuation purposes) summary performance metric. We identify three industries where earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) and cash from operations (CFO) are preferred, and three industries where specific non‐GAAP performance metrics are preferred. As a benchmark, we also examine the ability of EBITDA and CFO to explain returns for seven industries for which earnings is the preferred metric. Results for the benchmark earnings industries show that earnings dominates EBITDA and CFO in explaining returns. All other results are inconsistent with the view that perceptions of preferred metrics are reflected in actual aggregate investment behaviors.

Disclosures, Litigation risk, Rule 10b-5, Discretionary disclosures

Disclosures, Earnings announcements, Trading periods, Nontrading periods

We re-examine the effects of regulation fair disclosure (Reg FD) using ADRs (who are exempt from Reg FD) to control for confounding events which affected all traded firms. Tests based on public information metrics (returns volatility, informational efficiency and trading volume) and on analyst information metrics (forecast dispersion and accuracy) suggest that Reg FD did not uniquely affect the US information environment. However, analyst report informativeness declined for US firms relative to ADR firms, providing evidence consistent with Reg FD achieving one of its objectives–reducing private information flows to analysts.

Bayesian learning implies decreasing weights on prior beliefs and increasing weights on the accuracy of the analyst's past forecast record, as the number of forecast errors comprising her forecast record (its length) increases. Consistent with this model of investor learning, empirical tests show that investors’ reactions to forecast news are increasing in the product of the accuracy and length of analysts’ forecast records. Moreover, the Bayesian learning predicted by our model is more descriptive of investor reactions than is a static model which predicts that investors’ responses condition only on the prior accuracy of the analyst.

ABSTRACT We investigate the relations among voluntary disclosure, earnings quality, and cost of capital. We find that firms with good earnings quality have more expansive voluntary disclosures (as proxied by a self‐constructed index of coded items found in 677 firms' annual reports and 10‐K filings in fiscal 2001) than firms with poor earnings quality. In unconditional tests, we find that more voluntary disclosure is associated with a lower cost of capital. However, consistent with the complementary association between disclosure and earnings quality, we find that the disclosure effect on cost of capital is substantially reduced or disappears completely (depending on the cost of capital proxy) once we condition on earnings quality. Extensions probing alternative proxies show that our findings are robust to measures of earnings quality and cost of capital, but not to other measures of voluntary disclosure. In particular, we find opposite relations for voluntary disclosure measures based on management forecasts and conference calls, and we find no relations for a press release based measure.

We investigate whether investors price accruals quality, our proxy for the information risk associated with earnings. Measuring accruals quality (AQ) as the standard deviation of residuals from regressions relating current accruals to cash flows, we find that poorer AQ is associated with larger costs of debt and equity. This result is consistent across several alternative specifications of the AQ metric. We also distinguish between accruals quality driven by economic fundamentals (innate AQ) versus management choices (discretionary AQ). Both components have significant cost of capital effects, but innate AQ effects are significantly larger than discretionary AQ effects.

Jennifer Francis, Per Olsson, Dennis R. Oswald, Comparing the Accuracy and Explainability of Dividend, Free Cash Flow, and Abnormal Earnings Equity Value Estimates, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 2000), pp. 45-70