Managers often release earnings forecasts in advance of actual earnings announcements. It would appear that managers should at best be indifferent to such release given that the actual earnings will be disclosed at a future date. However, if the manager’s objective is to maximize his firm’s market value and he has control of production decisions, he may be motivated to release an earnings forec...

This paper uses high frequency data to evaluate whether information asymmetry in the market is reduced as a result of corporate earnings and dividend announcements. Changes in the level of information asymmetry due to the announcements are proxied by the rate of change in trading volume, bid-ask spread, cumulative abnormal returns, and order imbalance. Our results show support for an informatio...

Managers face a number of incentives to report earnings that meet or exceed the consensus analyst forecast. If a firm’s results of operations are not sufficient to meet the analysts’ expectations for a given period, the manager may 1) use accrual based earnings management techniques or 2) structure actual transactions to achieve the desired financial reporting result. Additionally, the manager ...

The computation of implied cost of capital (ICC) is constrained by the fact that around half of all firms do not have analysts’ earnings forecasts. Hou, van Dijk and Zhang (2012, HVZ) present a cross-sectional model to generate forecasts and compute ICC from these forecasts. However, the forecasts from the HVZ model perform worse than those from a naïve random walk model and show anomalous corr...

This paper examines the relationship of analysts’ coverage, forecasting errors and earnings management. It corroborates the role of analysts as gatekeepers by finding that analysts enhance transparency and reduce the scope of earnings management. To identify analysts’ coverage we used the I/B/E/S, from where we also obtained information on the consensus projections of analysts for listed Brazil...

Early studies examining the effect of Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD) report a possible chilling effect on the quantity and quality of corporate disclosures. Approved in August 2000 by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Reg FD mandates against selective disclosure of corporate information. At the time of its release, the financial community expressed concern that the regulation w...

This study investigates the reliability of management earnings forecasts with reference to these two ingredients: verifiability and neutrality. Specifically, we examine the biasedness (or accuracy) of management earnings forecasts and company specific characteristics that can be associated with accuracy. Based on sample of 102 IPO prospectuses published for admission on NYSE Euronext Paris from...

this paper investigates the relationship between earnings management and quality of earnings for the bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms listed in the tehran stock exchange from 2007 to 2012.the earnings quality  is measured by four separate accounting-based earnings attributes: accruals quality, earnings persistence, earnings predictability; earnings and is also examined by testing the relationshi...