Do accruals-based earnings provide better information about future operating cash flows than do operating cash flows themselves, as predicted by the Financial Accounting Standards Board's conceptual framework (FASB, 1978)? While this is a foundational issue in accounting, because it addresses the information added by accrual accounting methods, testing it remains unsettled. We show that when comparing the predictive ability of operating cash flows with that of an equivalent earnings measure calculated on an accrual basis, earnings outperform operating cash flows. The result becomes more pronounced when allowance is made for cross-sectional differences in the relation between firms' earnings and future cash flows. In fact, even “bottom line” earnings then have similar explanatory power as operating cash flows.

The new accounting standard requires that financial institutions estimate expected credit losses on their loan portfolios. The predictability of long-term losses, however, remains an open question. We develop a model that predicts long-term loan losses and incorporates adjustments for macroeconomic forecasts. The model combines cross-sectional predictions with a high-dimensional dynamic factor model that tracks aggregate losses over the business cycle. The model predicts long-term losses out-of-sample with significantly greater accuracy than the Harris et al. (2018) model and several other alternatives. It is also more effective at detecting bank failures. We use the model to estimate the present value of expected losses and the expected loss overhang for a given bank-quarter. The estimated present values subsume information in reported allowances and in fair value disclosures about long-term losses; the evidence is also consistent with loss overhang distorting banks' decisions. The model provides a useful benchmark to study loan loss provisioning.

We provide evidence that financial shocks to lenders influence the composition of financial covenants in debt contracts. Using two distinct measures of lender-specific shocks—defaults in a lender's corporate loan portfolio that occur outside the borrower's region and industry, and non-corporate loan delinquencies—we show that lenders respond to financial shocks by increasing the number and strictness of performance-based but not of capital-based covenants in debt contracts. We examine two possible channels for this result. We find evidence consistent with lenders using stricter control rights because of concerns about capital depletion (a capital channel) and because of new information about lenders' own screening ability (a learning channel). Our results indicate that lender preferences influence how accounting information is used in debt contracts.