Earnings manipulation has become a widespread practice for US corporations. However, most studies in the literature focus on whether certain incentives would facilitate managers to manipulate earnings and there has been little evidence documenting the consequences of earnings manipulation. This paper fills this gap by examining how current accruals affect future earnings (the accrual effect) an...

The volatility of future earnings growth is a significant determinant of Fama and French’s Value premium. We use a stochastic earnings model of firm valuation to establish a formal link between the volatility of future earnings growth and the value premium. Furthermore we empirically confirm this relationship at the macro-level.

This paper examines whether managers signal firms’ future performance by managing earnings to exceed thresholds. Because managers’ reporting discretion is bounded by the accounting regulations, managing earnings to exceed current period’s thresholds reduces future earnings and therefore makes future earnings thresholds harder to reach. As a result, only firms with sufficient future earnings gro...

All 137 publicly listed firms in New Zealand were used to analyse the relationship between dividend changes and earning changes. The question being asked is: Do dividend changes point to good past performance, good current performance, or signal growth in future performance. The findings show that there is no statistically significant relationship between dividend changes and either past or fut...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how advice affects the gender gap in the entry into a real-effort tournament. Our experiment is motivated by the concerns raised by approaching the gender gap through affirmative action. Advice is given by subjects who have already had some experience with the participation decision. We show that advice improves the entry decision of subjects, in that...

Barberis, Shleifer, and Vishny (1998) construct a model in which investors use the prevalence of past trend reversals as an indicator of the likelihood of future reversals. While such “regime-shifting” beliefs are consistent with a variety of psychological theories, other contrary predictions are consistent with the same theories. We report two experiments with MBA-student participants that str...

Purpose: This paper explores how Corporate Environmental Reputation (CER) affects the association between current annual stock returns and current and future annual earnings. In particular, it examines the potential usefulness of CER to investors in predicting future earnings. Methodology: We use the returns-earnings regression model introduced by Collins et al. (1994) to examine the importance...

This paper documents a dramatic increase in the college enrollment rate of women from 1955 to 1980 and asks a quantitative question: to what extent can such increase be accounted for by the change in the female cohort-specific college wage premium? I develop and calibrate an overlapping generations model with discrete schooling choice. I find that changes in the life-cycle earnings differential...

In this paper we exploit a unique database that merges longitudinal earnings data on Pennsylvanian workers with national death records to study the detailed nature of the correlation between earnings and mortality. We find that the estimates typically reported in the literature, which are based on single years of earnings data, are likely to understate substantially the strength of the associat...