Earnings are an important contributor to value, but a deal’s harm to the balance sheet can more than offset the value of increased earnings. Of course you want to see earnings per share increase, but not if your share price ultimately drops. If your company has access to cheap currency (a low cost of borrowing or a high stock price), it is easy to do an accretive deal. However, your cheap curre...

This paper examines business cycle variation in the earnings-returns relation. Earnings are more persistent when growth rates are high (i.e., in an expansion) than when growth rates are low (i.e., in a recession). Earnings are more persistent when production is high (i.e., in a credit crunch period) than when production is low (i.e., in a reliquification period). Relatedly, earnings response co...

This study examines the association between different institutional investors’ ownership and earnings management practice using a neural networks approach. It investigates this relationship for a sample of 121 US firms. We examine also the effect of institutional ownership on the level of accruals management of firms having different information environment (S&P 500 versus non S&P 500). Results...

I this paper we examine the relationship between inventory levels and one-year-ahead earnings of retailers using publicly available financial data. We use benchmarking metrics obtained from operations management literature to demonstrate an inverted-U relationship between abnormal inventory growth and one-year-ahead earnings per share for retailers. We also find that equity analysts do not full...

We examine the relation between firms' debt maturity structures and the propensity to manage earnings. Our results indicate that (i) firms with more current debt are more susceptible to managing earnings, (ii) this relation is stronger for firms facing debt market constraints (those without investment grade debt) and (iii) auditor characteristics such as auditor quality and tenure help diminish...

Behavioral Finance aims to explain empirical anomalies by introducing investor psychology as a determinant of asset pricing. This study provides strong evidence that anomalous stock price behavior following earnings announcements is due to a representativeness bias. It investigates current and past earnings surprises and subsequent market reaction for listed US companies over the period 1983-19...

This paper experimentally investigates investment behavior. We find that global risk – i.e. risk independent of an agent’s investment decision (like political risk) – substantially decreases investment. Also, if the capital used for investment is based on previous earnings (effort) instead of an endowment, investment decreases substantially. These results are neither in line with expected utili...

In response to accounting scandals, market control systems (e.g. regulations related to internal control systems) have become more stringent in order to restore investors’ confidence in capital markets. Tightening control systems has triggered a fierce debate on its effect on both capital markets and the real economy. My dissertation studies how mitigating earnings management by tightening cont...