Recent studies document that firms conducting seasoned equity offerings experience poor stock price and earnings performance in the post-offering period. I investigate whether earnings management around the time of the offering can explain a portion of the poor performance. Consistent with this explanation, I show that earnings management during the year around the offering predicts both earnings changes and market-adjusted stock returns in the following year. These findings suggest that the stock market temporarily overvalues issuing firms and is subsequently disappointed by predictable declines in earnings caused by earnings management.

[We provide evidence that the auto-regressive structure of seasonally differenced quarterly earnings is consistent with the requirements of the integral approach to interim reporting. In particular, we show that the auto-regressive coefficients for standardized seasonally differenced quarterly earnings are larger when the quarters employed in the auto-regressions belong to the same fiscal year than when they belong to different fiscal years. We then show that the signs and magnitudes of abnormal stock returns following earnings announcements are systematically related to these differences in the auto-regressive structure of seasonally differenced quarterly earnings. Specifically, stock returns act as if investors underestimate the larger auto-regressive coefficients between quarters in the same fiscal year. Thus, we corroborate and extend the Bernard and Thomas (1990) hypothesis that stock prices fail to reflect the extent to which quarterly earnings series differ from a seasonal random walk.]

In this article we examine whether insider share selling in an initial public offering (IPO) influences R&D expenditures. Insiders (managers and venture capitalists) who sell their pre‐offering shareholdings might try to increase the IPO offer price (1) by overinvesting in R&D to signal the firm's prospects (the signaling hypothesis) or (2) by underinvesting in R&D to increase current reported earnings (the earnings fixation hypothesis). We find that, for a sample of 243 IPOs from 1986 to 1990, change in R&D spending in the year of the IPO is negatively related to managerial selling. Because reductions in R&D spending increase current earnings at the expense of future earnings, our evidence suggests that managers believe that investors place more emphasis on current earnings and less emphasis on R&D and therefore spend less on R&D. We also document a positive association between discretionary current accruals in the offering year and managerial selling, suggesting that selling managers manipulate accruals as well.

We provide evidence that the auto-regressive structure of seasonally differenced quarterly earnings is consistent with the requirements of the integral approach to interim reporting. In particular, we show that the auto-regressive coefficients for standardized seasonally differenced quarterly earnings are larger when the quarters employed in the auto-regressions belong to the same fiscal year than when they belong to different fiscal years. We then show that the signs and magnitudes of abnormal stock returns following earnings announcements are systematically related to these differences in the auto-regressive structure of seasonally differenced quarterly earnings. Specifically, stock returns act as if investors underestimate the larger auto-regressive coefficients between quarters in the same fiscal year. Thus, we corroborate and extend the Bernard and Thomas (1990) hypothesis that stock prices fail to reflect the extent to which quarterly earnings series differ from a seasonal random walk.