This study shows that analysts vary significantly in their responsiveness to earnings announcements, where responsiveness is defined as promptness of analysts’ first forecast revisions for the next quarter since the prior quarterly earnings announcements. Further evidence indicates that analysts’ responsiveness improves the efficiency of their expectations of future earnings immediately after t...

Discussions of retirement planning and Social Security policy often focus on replacement rates, which represent retirement income or Social Security benefits relative to preretirement earnings. Replacement rates are a rule of thumb designed to simplify the process of smoothing consumption over individuals' lifetimes. Despite their widespread use, however, there is no common means of measuring r...

I nvestors’ conŽ dence in the quality and integrity of corporate Ž nancial reports has been seriously shaken of late. The ever-increasing procession of headlines about fraudulent earnings, in ated asset values and understated liabilities reported by erstwhile leading companies—the likes of Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Xerox and a host of lesser household names, all audited by major accounting Ž rms—...

Tests of the life cycle human capital investment theory using the implied restrictions on the covariance structure of earnings have not been favorable to the theory. The theory implies that earnings follow individual specific growth paths, which has been modeled as a random coefficient on experience, or “random growth.” The random growth model implies an individual effect in earnings changes. A...

An interesting question in assessing value relevance of accounting variables is whether measures of value relevance are materially affected by market inefficiencies. We explore this question in two steps: First, we analytically examine the impact of market inefficiencies on the estimation of coefficients in value relevance regressions and derive a procedure that corrects potential biases caused...

We assess the degree of consumption smoothing implicit in a calibrated life-cycle version of the standard incomplete-markets model, and we compare it to the empirical estimates of Blundell et al. (2008) (BPP thereafter). We find that households in the model have access to less consumption smoothing against permanent earnings shocks than what is measured in the data. BPP estimate that 36% of per...

We examine the effects of rivals’ earnings news during the waiting period of an IPO’s going public process on IPO pricing and completion decision, and investigate the implication of these effects for post-IPO operating performance. We find that a signal-to-noise measure of rivals’ earnings news has significantly negative valuation effects on both price revision and initial return for completed ...

Abstract This paper tracks distributional changes over the last quarter of the twentieth century. We focus on three conceptually distinct distributions: the distribution of wages, the distribution of annual earnings and the distribution of total family income adjusted for family size. We show that all three distributions became less equal during the last half of the 1970’s and the 1980’s. This ...

Chile has usually been considered one of the outstanding countries in the World in terms of its record in reducing poverty. At the same time, income inequality in Chile remains high by international standards; in fact, cross-country comparisons places Chile amongst those countries with the highest dispersion of monetary income (World Bank 1997, 2001; Bravo and Contreras, 2004). This volume orig...

Kilbridge correctly points out that comparative effectiveness research (CER) does not require cost data. It should also be pointed out, however, that the composition of the quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) gain of one intervention over another—whether the QALY gain is achieved mainly in the dimension of longevity or in the dimension of quality of life—has real consequences in terms of comparat...