Companies making initial public offerings in Greece were obliged to include next year‟s profit in the new issue prospectuses until the regulations changed to voluntary status. This study takes advantage of these two regulatory regimes and compares the accuracy of earnings forecasts under both mandatory and voluntary disclosure environments. Findings indicate behavioural change, as pessimistic e...

This study uses a random effect panel model to examine the impact of CEO traits and compensation on earnings performance and financial leverage for the 729 listed US companies in ExecuComp over the period of 2001– 2010. The results indicate that CEO cash compensation has a negative relationship with earnings performance, but that it has a positive impact on financial leverage. Moreover, for CEO...

The interaction of liqu id ity constraints and a precautionary savings motive in an economy with consumer heterogeneity in the form of non-stationary, un insurab le , idiosyncratic earnings pro cesses re solves the risk free rate puzzle. The general equ ilibrium bu er stock saving model generates interest rates that match empirical regularities when idiosyncratic sho cks contain both persistent...

Firms account for a substantial share of earnings inequality. Although the standard explanation for why is that search frictions support an equilibrium with rents, this paper finds that compensating differentials are at least as important. To reach this finding, this paper develops a structural search model and estimates it on U.S. administrative data with 1.5 million firms and 100 million work...

This study uses data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID) to address a number of questions about life-cycle earnings mobility. It develops a dynamic reduced-form model of earnings and marital status that is nonstationary over the life-cycle. A Gibbs sampling-data augmentation algorithm facilitates use of the entire sample and provides numerical approximations to the exact posterior d...

This study examines the effect of earnings pressure on firms’ strategic behavior in output competition. We argue that firms facing earnings pressure will attempt to increase current profits to meet analysts’ forecasts by exploiting market power opportunities in their product markets, even at the risk of encouraging future entry and rival expansion. In commodity industries, this behavior will le...

Until its sales of a product materialize, a firm is a “pre-producer” in the market for that product. That firm may may be a new start-up, or it may already sell other products. Firms that do not succeed in generating sales eventually become discouraged and move on to other activities. When this fate befalls a lot of firms, as it recently did in several IT-related businesses, the indistry experi...

This study investigates how corporate governance characteristics affect earnings management of firms in Vietnam. In particular, we examine whether firm’s use of discretionary accruals is influenced by board size, state ownership and foreign ownership. Our empirical analysis is based on a relatively large sample of 570 non-financial Vietnamese listed firms from 2010 to 2014. We find that larger ...

a r t i c l e i n f o Previous literature finds that situations that put managers under significant levels of pressure (e.g. IPO, upcoming credit rating changes, violation of debt covenant, etc.) might affect the way earnings are manipulated. The aim of this study is to investigate whether the pressure caused by the non-temporary level of financial distress, conditions the choice between real a...

This paper shows that an important link between investor sentiment and firm overvaluation is optimistic earnings expectations, and that management earnings guidance helps resolve sentiment-driven overvaluation. Using previously identified firm characteristics, we find that most of the negative returns to uncertain firms in months following high-sentiment periods fall within the three-day window...