Good news is more persuasive when it is more consistent, and bad news is less damaging when it is less consistent. We show when Bayesian updating supports this intuition so that a biased sender prefers more or less variance in the news depending on whether the mean of the news exceeds expectations, and we apply the result to selective news distortion by a manager of multiple projects. If news f...

Earnings manipulation has become a widespread practice for US corporations. However, most studies in the literature focus on whether certain incentives would facilitate managers to manipulate earnings and there has been little evidence documenting the consequences of earnings manipulation. This paper fills this gap by examining how current accruals affect future earnings (the accrual effect) an...

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a serious, widespread problem that negatively affects women's lives, including their economic status. The current study explored whether the financial harm associated with IPV begins as early as adolescence. With longitudinal data from a sample of 498 women currently or formerly receiving welfare, we used latent growth curve modeling to examine the relationshi...

To answer these questions, we use a confidential panel dataset on earnings histories from the US Social Security Administration (SSA), which allows us to follow workers’ earnings over the business cycle. Our approach is to identify individuals who were in the top 1 percent of the earnings distribution just prior to the economy entering a recession or boom. We ask how the evolution of these work...

Building on the research on immigrant earnings reviewed in the first article of this series, "Research on Immigrant Earnings," the preceding article, "Adding Immigrants to Microsimulation Models," linked research results to various issues essential for incorporating immigrant earnings into microsimulation models. The discussions of that article were in terms of a closed system. That is, it exam...

This article asks whether information about immigrants beyond their age, education, and years since migration can be productively used to project their earnings. Although many factors could affect immigrant earnings, what is most useful for Social Security modelling purposes is relevant information that is readily available on a continuous basis. Country of origin is a good candidate, as it is ...

Previous empirical research has shown that Mexico’s Oportunidades program has succeeded in increasing schooling and improving health of disadvantaged children. This paper studies the program’s potential longer-term consequences for the poverty and inequality of these children. It adapts methods developed in Dinardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996) and incorporates existing experimental estimates of t...

This study examines the market valuation of accounting earnings during the period before it is publicly revealed that the earnings are fraudulent. Using both cross-sectional and time-series valuation models, we first find that the market accords less weight to earnings when the accounting numbers are fraudulent. We also show that the market better anticipates the presence of fraud when there is...

Four times per year, companies release earnings reports. Often the day following such reports, the stocks of these companies make significant moves either up or down from the resulting information. Such moves are often attributed to a large surprise between the analyst estimates for the stock and the actual earnings amounts. Unfortunately for the average trader, these jumps usually occur in a v...