An information usefulness approach to decision making points out that only the information is regarded as useful that will bring valuable messages to investors and lead to stock price adjustments. This study examines the effectiveness of audit committees in improving earnings quality and informativeness, particularly among family-owned firms. Earnings informativeness was measured through the re...

Theory suggests that managers issue earnings forecasts to reduce information asymmetry. An earnings forecast is more effective in reducing information asymmetry if it contains earnings news that is relatively more informative about the firm’s value. We hypothesize that a manager is more likely to issue an earnings forecast if investors perceive that earnings are more informative. We measure ear...

We examine whether the information content of earnings is inversely related to the degree of conformity between financial accounting income and taxable income. Our inquiry exploits a natural experiment first examined by Guenther et al. (1997) in which a set of U.S. firms were forced to increase their book-tax conformity as a result of a change in the tax law. We find evidence consistent with th...

Increasing income and wealth inequality has led to renewed interest in understanding and explaining wealth and income distributions, and in particular the recent growth in their top shares (Piketty, 2014). The literature has largely emphasized the role of earnings inequality in explaining wealth inequality. Indeed, Bewley-Aiyagari economies, which focus on precautionary savings as an optimal re...

Earnings non-synchronicity captures the extent to which firm-specific factors determine a firm’s earnings, and has important implications to a firm’s information environment. Prior research shows that high earnings non-synchronicity impedes corporate outsiders’ information processing. Given managers generally possess superior information about their firms’ unique operating and reporting strateg...

We link information on the current earnings of college graduates from many cohorts to their highschool records, their detailed college records and their demographics to infer the impact of college major on earnings. We develop an estimator to handle the potential for non-response bias and identify non-response using an affinity measure – the potential respondent’s link to the organization condu...

Overall income inequality in South Africa is very high, and generated the labour market a key driver of inequality. In this paper, I use Post-Apartheid Labour Market Series, General Household Surveys, administrative tax microdata to describe earnings Africa. estimate Gini coefficients, variance log earnings, various percentile ratios document changes

Previous literature studying analysts’ earnings forecasts examines their properties without considering firms’ response to analysts’ forecasts. This study improves upon previous research by considering firms’ earnings management with respect to analysts’ forecasts. I hypothesize that analysts understand firms’ earnings management practices, and incorporate firms’ expected behavior into their fo...