This dissertation consists of two essays. The first essay provides a rational explanation of the mysterious earnings discontinuity phenomenon. It also develops two new empirical predictions which are supported by the empirical tests. The second essay identifies conditions under which leading indicator variables discourage long-term investment. Essay 1: Discontinuity in Earnings Distribution: A ...

This paper proposes a new method for estimating the intergenerational persistence of lifetime earnings from data that contain only short sections of individual earnings histories. The approach infers lifetime earnings persistence from the persistence of short earnings averages together with information about the stochastic process governing individual earnings. I …nd that lifetime earnings are ...

this study presents empirical evidence concerning the effect of different accounting standard on earnings management. prior studies have shown that accounting standards influence earnings management. tighter accounting standards regime restricts management’s descretion to manipulate accruals, and at the same time, induce more costly real earnings management activities. to investigate this iss...

Information asymmetry in stock market can increase the risk of investment which in turn increases the capital cost of firms. Bhattacharya (1979) proposed a hypothesis that states dividend can act as a powerful signal in order to solve information asymmetry problem. We measured information asymmetry by lack of earnings transparency. Therefore we examine the effect of earnings transparency on cap...

We analyze the ability of earnings and non-earnings performance metrics to explain stock returns for industries where we identify, ex ante, an allegedly preferred (for valuation purposes) performance metric. We identify three industries each where earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) and cash from operations are preferred, and three industries where specific n...

investment institutions with substantial shareholdings in a firm have the resources and incentives to monitor and influence management decisions. whether the institutions actually monitor and exert pressure on managers is an empirical question.this study is designed to provide insights into the monitoring role of institutional investors by examining whether institutional ownership affects the i...

full, on-time, and with quality disclosure of financial information can lead to the transparency of such information and decreases information asymmetry. among the published information of firms, earnings are of priority importance attended by many users; therefore, the issue of the transparency of accounting earnings is of high importance. the aim of this study is investigating the accounting ...

This paper examines the differences in accrual-based and real earnings management across countries from the perspective of investor protection. Following prior research (Leuz et al., 2003), we hypothesize that accrual-based earnings management is more constrained by strict discipline in countries with stronger investor protection. For real earnings management in countries with stronger investor...

Managers engage in income smoothing either to communicate private information about future earnings to investors (informativeness hypothesis) or to distort financial performance for opportunistic purposes (opportunism hypothesis). Business cycles and the monitoring role of institutional ownership may affect the earnings informativeness of income smoothing. The purpose of this research is to exa...

We investigate whether the positive associations between discretionary accrual proxies and beating earnings benchmarks hold for comparisons of groups segregated at other points in the distributions of earnings, earnings changes, and analystsbased unexpected earnings. We refer to these points as ‘‘pseudo’’ targets. Results suggest that the positive association between discretionary accruals and ...