In what percentage of married couples do wives outearn their husbands, and, moreover, how persistent are these patterns? This study systematically examined variation in point-in-time estimates across alternative measures of earnings, definitions of types of couples, and data sources and gauged the persistence of these patterns for a period of three calendar years using data from the 2000 Curren...

The 1990-1991 recession has intensified concerns about the consequences of workers’ job losses. To estimate the magnitude and temporal pattern of displaced workers’ earnings losses, we exploit an unusual administrative data set that includes both employees’ quarterly earnings histories and information about their firms. We find that when high-tenure workers separate from distressed firms their ...

Reported earnings per share (EPS) are frequently rounded to the nearest cent. This paper provides evidence that firms manipulate earnings so that they can round-up and report one more cent of EPS. Specifically, we examine the digit immediately right of the decimal in the calculated earnings per share number expressed in cents. Evidence is presented that firms are more likely to round-up when ma...

In this paper, I examine a new approach for measuring earnings quality, defined as the closeness of reported earnings to “permanent earnings,” based on firm decisions with regard to capital and labor investments. Specifically, I measure earnings quality as the contemporaneous association between changes in the levels of capital and labor investment and the change in reported earnings. This appr...

23 Financial intermediaries, such as analysts, play an important role in providing information 24 to investors. However, a large segment of the market (about 39% of CRSP firms between 25 1992 and 2009) is not served by financial analysts, leaving investors in a poor information 26 environment. In this paper, we examine whether other publicly available information 27 signals, such as insider tra...

We argue that high quality firms that expect larger quantity of cash flows in the near future are more likely to actively smooth earnings via discretionary accruals before seasonal equity offerings to reduce underpricing. If high quality firms are confident about future earnings, it is also plausible to assume that they also push their offer prices up more aggressively, and lessen the degree of...

We study the impact of firms’ abnormal business operations on their future crash risk in stock prices. Computed based on real earnings management (REM) models, firms' deviation in real operations from industry norms (DRO) is shown to be positively associated with their future crash risk. This association is incremental to that between discretionary accruals (DA) and crash risk found by prior st...