The Complementarity Between Signal Informativeness and Monitoring

A firm that must decide whether to retain or terminate a manager can rely on several sources of information to assess managerial ability. When it relies on a performance signal and monitoring, we show that a more informative signal can surprisingly increase the value of monitoring. Then, signal precision and monitoring are complements. This happens if a more precise information system makes some signals more negative indicators of managerial ability that still do not trigger termination. When the turnover cost is high enough and the manager is more entrenched after a positive performance, an increase in signal precision increases expected monitoring. In firms with a high turnover cost, a less informative signal is compounded by worse monitoring after a disappointing performance. This “bad corporate governance trap” makes it hard for these firms to eventually improve performance.     

Do independent research analysts issue more or less informative recommendation revisions?

This paper studies whether independent research analysts issue more informative stock recommendation revisions than investment bank analysts. I find independent analyst recommendation upgrades and downgrades significantly less informative. I also investigate whether the identified differences in informativeness are the result of systematic cross-sectional variation in analyst ability, portfolio complexity, and brokerage firm resources. Including these variables reduces the disparity in information content between groups. However, independent revisions continue to have lower informativeness. I follow prior research and compute daily buy-and-hold abnormal returns to portfolios formed based on analyst firm type. I find that investment bank analyst portfolios generally outperform those of independent research analysts. Lastly, I examine market reactions before and after the Global Settlement Agreement that was enacted to limit the perceived conflicts in the industry. Lastly, investment bank analyst upgrades generate an 18.7% greater reaction in the post-regulation period, suggesting the Global Settlement helped mitigate biased research. Independent analysts continue to issue less informative recommendations.     

Do more able managers provide better non-GAAP earnings?

This paper investigates whether managerial ability is associated with non-GAAP earnings quality. I find that the quality of non-GAAP earnings is greater for high-ability managers than low-ability managers. I also find that investors consider non-GAAP earnings released by high-ability management to be informative. Additional tests show that the positive association between managerial ability and the quality of non-GAAP earnings is stronger when return volatility or managerial stock ownership is greater. The results are robust to alternative measures of managerial ability and non-GAAP earnings quality and to controlling for endogeneity bias. Overall, this paper provides evidence that managers of high ability use non-GAAP reporting as a signalling tool to reduce information asymmetry.     

Earnings Volatility, Cash Flow Volatility, and Informed Trading

I examine whether earnings that are smoother or more volatile than cash flows provide or garble information. Consistent with theories that predict more informed trading when public information is less informative, I find that bid-ask spreads and the probability of informed trading are higher both when earnings are smoother than cash flows and also when earnings are more volatile than cash flows. Additional tests suggest that managers' discretionary choices that lead to smoother or more volatile earnings than cash flows garble information, on average. However, I find that informed trading is attenuated in settings in which theory suggests that discretionary smoothing or volatizing of earnings is likely to be informative.     

To beat or not to beat? The importance of analysts’ cash flow forecasts

We investigate the implications of firms’ benchmark-beating patterns with respect to analysts’ quarterly cash flow forecasts for firms’ current capital market valuation and their future performance. We hypothesize that nonnegative earnings surprises are more likely to be supported by real operating performance and signal higher earnings quality if they are achieved via higher than expected cash flows or lower than expected accruals. We show that firms beating analyst earnings forecasts have larger positive capital market reactions and larger earnings response coefficients if they beat analyst cash flow forecasts or report lower than expected accruals. We also demonstrate that these firms’ superior future performance may provide an economic justification for their more favorable market response. Our findings suggest that firms’ ability to beat analyst cash flow forecasts is informative regarding the quality of their earnings surprises.     

How Skilled Are Security Analysts?

The majority of security analysts are identified as skilled when the cross-section of analyst performance is modeled as a mixture of multiple skill distributions. Analysts exhibit heterogeneous skill—some are high-type, and some are low-type. On average, the recommendation revisions of both types exhibit positive abnormal returns. The heterogeneity stems from differential ability to produce new information; all analysts can profitably process news. Top analysts outperform because more of their recommendations are influential (i.e., associated with statistically significant returns) and both their influential and noninfluential recommendations are more informative. A majority of research firms are also identified as skilled.     

Management Forecast Consistency

We posit that management forecasts, which are predictable transformations of realized earnings without random errors, are more informative than unbiased forecasts, which manifest small but unpredictable errors, even if biased forecasts are less accurate. Consistent with this intuition, we find that managers who make consistent forecasting errors have a greater ability to influence investor reactions and analyst revisions, even after controlling for the effect of accuracy. This effect is more economically significant and statistically robust than that of forecast accuracy. More sophisticated investors and experienced analysts are found to have a better understanding of the benefits of consistent management forecasts.     

The economic consequences of discrete recognition and continuous measurement

Discrete recognition is a long-standing and ubiquitous accounting practice, but it has been widely criticized for suppressing information and inducing accounting-motivated transactions. We study a model to examine the economic consequences of shifting away from discrete recognition to a continuous measurement approach. Without manipulation, discrete recognition is less informative than the continuous approach. However, the continuous regime induces more manipulation. The equilibrium informativeness is determined by both the accounting standard and endogenous manipulation. Discrete recognition is more informative than its continuous counterpart precisely when manipulation is a severe threat. We respond to the recent call in Kothari, Ramanna, and Skinner (2010) for using positive accounting theory to explain certain long-standing accounting practices. We also discuss the model's implications for fair value accounting.     

Information disclosure and the feedback effect in capital markets

Are more informative credit ratings always preferred and how should regulators intervene to promote investment efficiency? To answer these questions, we develop a model in which a manager seeks financing for a project. The main frictions are that the manager is privately informed about the project’s quality and cannot commit not to divert resources away from it. This setting gives rise to a feedback effect in which creditors’ beliefs about whether the manager diverts resources can become self-fulfilling. A critical consequence of this feedback effect is that more precise ratings can be detrimental for investment efficiency. Intuitively, by revealing that a firm is of worse quality and increasing its cost of finance, more informative ratings strengthen the manager’s incentive to withdraw resources away from the project and default. We show that the regulation of credit rating agencies should be lenient during good times and strict during bad times.     

Earnings quality and the heterogeneous relation between earnings and stock returns

We adopt a heterogeneous regime switching method to examine the informativeness of accounting earnings for stock returns. We identify two distinct time-series regimes in terms of the relation between earnings and returns. In the low volatility regime (typical of bull markets), earnings are moderately informative for stock returns. But in high volatility market conditions (typical of financial crisis), earnings are strongly related to returns. Our evidence suggests that earnings are more informative to investors when uncertainty and risk is high which is consistent with the idea that during market downturns investors rely more on fundamental information about the firm. Next, we identify groups of firms that follow similar regime dynamics. We find that the importance of accounting earnings for returns in each of the market regimes varies across firms: certain firms spend more time in a regime where their earnings are highly relevant to returns, and other firms spend more time in a regime where earnings are moderately relevant to returns. We also show that firms with poorer accrual quality have a greater probability of belonging to the high volatility regime.     

Herding among Investment Newsletters: Theory and Evidence

A model is developed which implies that if an analyst has high reputation or low ability, or if there is strong public information that is inconsistent with the analyst's private information, she is likely to herd. Herding is also common when informative private signals are positively correlated across analysts. The model is tested using data from analysts who publish investment newsletters. Consistent with the model's implications, the empirical results indicate that a newsletter analyst is likely to herd on Value Line's recommendation if her reputation is high, if her ability is low, or if signal correlation is high.     

The summary informativeness of stock trades: an econometric analysis

In a security market with asymmetrically informed participants,trades are signals of private information. In this article,new measures of trade informativeness are proposed based ona decomposition of the variance of changes in the efficientprice into trade-correlated and -uncorrelated components. Thetrade-correlated component has a natural interpretation as anabsolute measure of trade informativeness. The ratio of thiscomponent to the total variance is a relative measure (i.e.,a proportion normalized with respect to the total public information).For a sample of NYSE-listed companies, trades are found to bemore informative for small firms in both absolute and relativesenses. From an analysis of intraday patterns, it appears thattrades are in absolute terms more informative at the beginningof trading, but slightly less informative in relative terms.     

Firm size,information acquisition and price efficiency

We present a model in a competitive market where traders choose between a small and a large firm to acquire costly private information, but they also obtain free public information by observing equilibrium share prices. Our major finding is the existence of a noisy rational expectation competitive equilibrium, in which there are more informed traders of the large firm than those of the small firm. As a result, share prices of the large firm are more informative than those of the small firm. Our empirical study supports the analytical results. By using a bivariate vector autoregressive regression, we are able to conduct a variance decomposition of share prices for different size portfolios. We find that prices of large-size portfolios are more informative because non-value-related price shocks are less important in driving price changes of large-size portfolios than in the case of small-size portfolios.     

Understanding analysts' use of stock returns and other analysts' revisions when forecasting earnings

We investigate analysts' use of stock returns and other analysts' forecast revisions in revising their own forecasts after an earnings announcement. We find that analysts respond more strongly to these signals when the signals are more informative about future earnings changes. Although analysts underreact to these signals on average, we find that analysts who are most sensitive to signal informativeness achieve superior forecast accuracy relative to their peers and have a greater influence on the market. The results suggest that the ability to extract information from the actions of others serves as one source of analyst expertise.     

CBDC uncertainty: Financial market implications

The current state of the art in the central bank digital currency (CBDC) literature views indexes constructed from digital currency news to be fully informed about CBDC uncertainty and its impact on the financial system. We argue that the hedging behavior of participants in the currency futures market could be more informative than CBDC uncertainty news in the presence of limited risk absorption capacity in futures markets. We show that the hedging factor has a statistically significant effect on financial market risk aversion and measures of uncertainty. The hedging behavior of currency futures market participants is informative of agents' reactions to the news and central bank policies around CBDC. Our results also show that CBDC uncertainty is a significant risk transmitter in the financial system. Hence, this characteristic makes the hedging factor even more important because it can directly impact risk aversion via its moderating effects, which later influence CBDC uncertainty.     

The Information Content of Management's Prospective Comments in Financially Distressed Companies: A Note

Prior research revealed management's prospective comments (MPCs) in annual reports to be informative with respect to companies' future performance. As the finding was derived from analyses of random samples of companies, it is not known whether it is generalizable to companies that are experiencing financial distress. This study investigates whether disclosure of MPCs in the annual reports of companies experiencing financial distress is informative with regard to their future viability. The MPCs of 140 Australian public companies that had experienced significant losses were identified and then categorized as optimistic, pessimistic, mixed or no MPCs. Results from logistic regression analysis indicate that such MPCs provided information incremental to that contained in historical financial information about companies' future viability. It was also found that, while companies that did not disclose any MPCs were more likely to fail than companies that disclosed optimistic MPCs, they were as likely to fail as companies that disclosed pessimistic or mixed MPCs. This suggests that financially distressed companies avoid disclosing MPCs in the absence of an optimistic outlook, a finding that supports Darrough and Stoughton's (1990) theory of selective disclosure.     

Peer firms in relative performance evaluation

Relative performance evaluation (RPE) in chief executive officer (CEO) compensation provides insurance against external shocks and yields a more informative measure of CEO actions. I argue that empirical evidence on the use of RPE is mixed because previous studies rely on a misspecified peer group. External shocks and flexibility in responding to the shocks are functions of, for example, the firm's technology, the complexity of the organization, and the ability to access external credit, which depend on firm size. When peers are composed of similar industry-size firms, evidence is consistent with the use of RPE in CEO compensation.     

When is inter-transaction time informative?

This paper estimates the role of inter-transaction time in price discovery for 100 NYSE-listed firms between 1993 and 2003. We find faster arriving trades move prices more than slower arriving trades across stocks and across time. We further document that the information content of inter-transaction time varies with trading activity, and is weakest for the most actively traded stocks. We then distinguish trades in the same direction as the previous trade from trades in the reverse direction. Our empirical findings document that inter-transaction time is informative for both types of trades, but in opposite directions. Faster arriving trades in the same direction are more informative, whereas faster arriving trades in opposite directions are less informative.     

Evaluating the Implementation of a Mandatory Dual Reporting System: The Case of Indonesian Local Government

Informative and transparent financial information in the public sector is crucial for improving public sector management and eradicating corruption. Given this, Indonesia has reformed its public sector accounting, reporting and accountability systems by implementing a dual reporting system known as ‘cash towards accrual’, following similar reforms in developed countries. Drawing on the experience of five local governments (districts) in Indonesia, this study finds that the implementation of the dual reporting system has helped local governments to produce transparent and informative reports. However, the accrual‐based contents of the dual reports produced by the new reporting system are underused for decision making. In addition, there has been a significant increase in costs associated with the implementation of the new accounting regime in the jurisdictions studied. The study also finds that the ability of the users to use information generated by the new accounting system is more important than just a legal and mandatory requirement to use the new system.