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...

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...

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...

We document that firms’ management of accounting earnings increased steadily from 1987 until the passage of the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), with a significant increase during the period prior to SOX, followed by a significant decline after passage of SOX. However, the increase in earnings management preceding SOX was primarily in poorly performing industries. We also show that the informativeness...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to add to our understanding of the monitoring role of multiple large shareholders by examining their impact on the informativeness of firms’ earnings. Design/methodology/approach – We use regression models that relate earnings to stock returns for a sample of 402 French publicly traded firms covered during 2003-2007. Findings – We show that earnings inform...

This paper analyzes the bene…ts and costs of …nancial statement comparability from an information perspective. We …rst show analytically that while comparability enhances the correlation among …rms’reported earnings (“common informativeness”), it reduces …rms’own reporting precision (“individual informativeness”). Next, we provide theoretical justi…cation for the comparability measure of De Fra...

We investigate the relative informativeness of earnings and dividends for firms with dual class capital structures. In these firms, two classes of common stock create a separation between cash flow rights and voting rights. Despite the concentrated ownership in the dual class firms, we find significantly lower informativeness of earnings, in the form of a weaker returns-earnings association, th...

August 2013 Elizabeth Demers Darden Graduate School of Business University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 22903 [email protected] Clara Vega Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System Washington, DC 20551 [email protected] Abstract Using automated textual analysis algorithms to quantify the content of more than 20,000 managerial press releases from 1998 to 2006, this study pre...