Altamuro and Beatty (2009) examine financial reporting quality before and after the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act (FDICIA). They document increases in the validity of the loan-loss provision, earnings persistence, predictability of future cash flows and reductions in benchmark-beating for banks complying with FDIC's internal control regulations relative to non-complying banks. Our discussion focuses on Altamuro and Beatty's interpretation of the results, specifically that the internal control provision of FDICIA improved financial reporting quality. In this paper, we provide a brief overview of FDICIA in an attempt to assess the importance of FDIC's internal control regulations. We then review the findings of other studies on internal control regulations with the goal of evaluating what new insights we gain from Altamuro and Beatty. Next, we report new evidence relating to the sub-groups driving the changes in financial reporting quality surrounding the FDICIA. Finally, we discuss the results in the context of the current financial crisis and suggest avenues for future research.

We investigate three potential channels of analyst value creation: improving fundamental performance through monitoring, reducing information asymmetry, and increasing investor recognition. We show that changes in investor recognition have consistent explanatory power for the market reaction to coverage initiations and terminations but find mixed evidence for changes in information asymmetry and no evidence for changes in fundamental performance as determinants of the market reaction. These results suggest that analysts create value for firms under their coverage by improving their investor recognition and not by monitoring or reducing information asymmetry.

We examine how the mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in continental Europe affects the contractual usefulness of accounting information in executive compensation, as reflected in pay-performance sensitivity (PPS) and relative performance evaluation (RPE). The empirical evidence indicates a weak increase in accounting-based PPS in the post-adoption period, primarily driven by countries with large differences between IFRS and their previously adopted local accounting standards. We also document a significant increase in accounting-based RPE using foreign peers after the adoption. Additional analysis shows that the increase in RPE is greater for firms with more foreign sales, and for those with lower availability of domestic peers of comparable size. The overall results are consistent with the compensation committees in those countries perceiving earnings after IFRS adoption to be of higher quality and comparability. Our paper highlights an important benefit of IFRS largely ignored by the literature, that is, the higher earnings quality and comparability brought by the adoption of IFRS facilitate executive compensation contracting.

Previous research indicates that firms issue shares when their stock is overpriced and repurchase shares when their stock is underpriced. Such transactions transfer wealth from transacting stockholders to ongoing stockholders. We quantify the magnitude of these wealth transfers and analyze their implications. Strikingly, we find that for the average firm-year, these wealth transfers approximate 40% of net income. We also find that these wealth transfers can be predicted using a variety of firm characteristics and that future wealth transfers are an important determinant of current stock prices.

We investigate the determinants of analysts' target price implied returns and the implication of our findings for investment decision-making. We identify four broad sets of factors that help explain the cross-sectional variation in target price implied returns: future realized stock returns, errors in forecasting fundamentals, errors in forecasting the expected return to risk, and biases relating to analysts' incentives. Our results suggest that all four sets help explain target price implied returns, with errors in forecasting the expected return to empirical risk proxies having the greatest impact. Collectively, these variables explain nearly a quarter of the cross-sectional variation in target price implied returns. We use our model to predict the optimistic bias in target price implied returns and evaluate whether investors correctly ignore the predictable bias. The results suggest that investors make similar valuation errors to analysts and/or do not perfectly back out the predicted bias in target prices.

We investigate analysts' motives for rounding annual EPS forecasts (placing a zero or five in the penny location of the forecast). We first show that an intuitive reason for analysts to engage in rounding is in circumstances where the penny digit of the forecast is of less economic significance. By rounding, analysts reveal that their forecasts are not intended to be precise to the penny. We also show that analyst incentives impact the likelihood of rounding. Specifically, we predict that analysts will exert less effort forecasting earnings for firms that generate less brokerage or investment banking business since such firms create less value for the analysts' employers. As a consequence of this reduced effort and attention, the analyst will be more uncertain about the penny digit of the forecast and so will round. Our results are consistent with this prediction. One implication of our findings is that a rounded forecast is a simple and easily observable proxy for a more noisy measure of the market's expectation of earnings. Consistent with this implication, we show that rounded forecasts bias down earnings response coefficients at earnings announcements.