Human Capital Investment: The Returns from Education and Training to the Individual,the Firm and the Economy

This paper provides a non-technical review of the evidence on the returns to education and training for the individual, the firm and the economy at large. It begins by reviewing the empirical work that has attempted to estimate the true causal effect of education and training on individual earnings, focusing on the recent literature that has attempted to control for potential biases in the estimated returns to education and training. It then moves on to review the literature that has looked at the returns from human capital investments to employers. Lack of suitable data and methodological difficulties have resulted in a paucity of studies that have carried out sound empirical work on this issue. In the final part of the review, we look at the work that has tried to assess the contribution of human capital to national economic growth at the macroeconomic level. This work has generally involved using either a ‘growth accounting’ theoretical framework or ‘new growth’ theories. Although the empirical macroeconomic evidence that accompanies this work does not generally allow one to distinguish between the two approaches, there is a substantial body of evidence on the contribution of education to economic growth.     

Accounting-based downside risk,cost of capital,and the macroeconomy

We hypothesize that earnings downside risk, capturing the expectation for future downward operating performance, contains distinct information about firm risk and varies with cost of capital in the cross section of firms. Consistent with the validity of the earnings downside risk measure, we find that, relative to low earnings downside risk firms, high earnings downside risk firms experience more negative operating performance over the subsequent period, are more sensitive to downward macroeconomic states, and are more strongly linked to earnings attributes and other risk-related measures from prior research. In line with our prediction, we also find that earnings downside risk explains variation in firms’ cost of capital, and that this link between earnings downside risk and cost of capital is incremental to several earnings attributes, accounting and risk factor betas, return downside risk, default risk, earnings volatility, and firm fundamentals. Overall, this study contributes to accounting research by demonstrating the key valuation and risk assessment roles of earnings downside risk derived from firms’ financial statements, also shedding new light on the link between accounting and the macroeconomy.     

Earnings Surprises,Growth Expectations,and Stock Returns or Don't Let an Earnings Torpedo Sink Your Portfolio

We provide new evidence that the inferior returns to growth stocks relative to value stocks are the result of expectational errors about future earnings performance. Our evidence demonstrates that growth stocks exhibit an asymmetric response to earnings surprises. We show that while growth stocks are at least as likely to announce negative earnings surprises as positive earnings surprises, they exhibit an asymmetrically large negative price response to negative earnings surprises. After controlling for this asymmetric price response, we find no remaining evidence of a return differential between growth and value stocks. We conclude that the inferior return to growth stocks is attributable to overoptimistic expectational errors that are corrected through subsequent negative earnings surprises.     

Earnings expectations,investor trade size,and anomalous returns around earnings announcements

We provide evidence that identifiable subsets of investors use significantly different information sets. Investors initiating large trades respond to analysts’ earnings forecast errors, while investors initiating small trades respond to a less-sophisticated signal that underestimates the implications of current earnings innovations for future earnings levels. This suggests small investors exhibit the behavior that Bernard and Thomas [Journal of Accounting and Economics 13, 305–340] theorize causes post-earnings announcement drift. We also use analysts’ forecasts to significantly improve the predictability of returns around earnings announcements previously documented by Bernard and Thomas. Finally, results attempting to link return predictability to the prevalence of small-investor trading are mixed.     

Child Labor, School Attendance, and Intrahousehold Gender Bias in Brazil

An extensive survey data set of Brazilian households is usedto test whether intrahousehold gender bias affects the decisionsof mothers and fathers to send their sons and daughters to workand to school. An intrahousehold allocation model is examinedin which fathers and mothers may affect the education investmentand the child labor participation of their sons and daughtersdifferently because of differences in parental preferences ordifferences in how additional schooling affects sons' and daughters'acquisition of human capital. Brazilian household survey datafor 1998 are used to estimate the impact of each parent's educationon the labor market participation and school attendance of theirsons and daughters. For labor market participation, the father'seducation has a greater negative impact than the mother's educationon the labor status of sons. The father's education also hasa greater impact on sons' labor status than on daughters'. Forschooling decisions, the mother's education has a greater positiveimpact than the father's education on daughters' school attendance,but fathers have a greater positive impact on sons' school attendancethan on daughters'.     

Performance, Growth and Earnings Management

We study the relationship between the amount of managed earnings and firms’ earnings performance and expected growth in a reporting model, where managers manipulate earnings to influence the valuation of firms’ equity while bearing a cost that is increasing and convex in the amount of managed earnings. In the unique revealing equilibrium to the model, firms with higher performance and growth over-report earnings by a larger amount because price responsiveness increases with earnings performance and growth. And earnings quality, defined as the proportion of true economic earnings in total reported earnings, increases with earnings performance but decreases with earnings growth. We conduct empirical tests on a large sample and a restatement sample using different proxies for earnings management. Results from the large sample tests support our predictions while results from the restatement sample tests are mixed. Our study provides an alternative explanation to the positive relationship between discretionary accruals estimated from the Jones model and firms’ performance and growth.     

Value versus growth stocks in Singapore

This study examines value and growth stocks in Singapore. Specifically, we examine the value premium up to 5 years after the value and growth portfolio formation. We also examine if growth (value) stocks really indicate higher (lower) company profits in the later years, whether analysts’ forecasts are overly optimistic/pessimistic, and if earnings and earnings growth exhibit mean reversion. Our findings are, first, there is a value premium for Singapore stocks, but the premium is concentrated in the first 2 years after the portfolio formation. Second, value (growth) stocks do indicate low (high) earnings growth rates and low (high) return on equity (ROE) in the following years. Third, earnings growth is significantly overestimated for growth stocks but it is not underestimated for value stocks, indicating a one-way over-reaction. Finally, there is some evidence of mean reversion for excess ROE but not for excess earnings growth rates.     

Unemployment insurance benefits and income smoothing

Labor unemployment insurance reduces unemployment concerns. We argue that these benefits moderate incentives to smooth earnings to reduce employees’ concerns about unemployment risk. Using exogenous variations in unemployment insurance benefits, we find evidence consistent with this argument. We also find that the link between unemployment insurance benefits and income smoothing is stronger when there is higher unemployment risk and when the firm is likely to employ more low-wage workers, who find unemployment insurance benefits especially useful. Our paper contributes to the literature by showing that public policy decisions such as unemployment insurance have significant, albeit probably unintended, externalities on corporate financial reporting.     

Financial Crisis And Earnings Management: The European Evidence

We examine the impact of the 2008–2009 financial crisis on the earnings management behavior of European-listed firms. We find that earnings management has significantly decreased in the crisis years. This trend is confirmed in most of the 16 countries under review. We also report a link between the level of earnings management and the economic growth rate and provide evidence suggesting that national characteristics and market forces affect the propensity of income smoothing but not accruals quality.     

The Information Content of Cash Flow Figures

This paper investigates the link between earnings and share prices for a sample of UK companies for the years 1961 to 1977. Three measures of earnings were used: the traditional historical cost accounting return and two which were closer to cash flow measures. The strength of the link between earnings and cumulative abnormal returns was investigated relative to the level of inflation. The results indicate that, while there is substantial information content in the traditional historical cost rate of return, there is very little information conveyed by the measure closest to pure cash flow. No support was therefore found for the use of cash flow based reports. Evidence was found showing substantial changes in the nature of the relationship between accounting and stock returns, but this could not be explained by the effects of inflation.     

Investment Dynamics and Earnings‐Return Properties: A Structural Approach

We propose the standard neoclassical model of investment under uncertainty with short‐run adjustment frictions as a benchmark for earnings‐return patterns absent accounting influences. We show that our proposed benchmark generates a wide range of earnings‐return patterns documented in accounting research. Notably, our model generates a concave earnings‐return relation, similar to that of Basu [1997], and predicts that the earnings‐return concavity increases with the volatility of firms’ underlying shock processes and decreases with the level of firms’ investments. We find strong empirical support for these predictions. Overall, our evidence suggests that our proposed benchmark is useful for understanding the joint dynamics of variables of interest to accounting research (e.g., earnings, returns, investment, market‐to‐book) absent accounting influences, a necessary precondition for inferring the effects of accounting from these dynamics.     

The Effect of Board Diversity on Earnings Quality: An Empirical Study of Listed Firms in Vietnam

Previous studies have established that firms’ effectiveness can differ based on the differences among directors within a board, and between boards. However, studies have yet to establish the effectiveness of the diverse attributes of the board on firms’ quality of earnings in an emerging market setting such as Vietnam. This study investigates the effect of board diversity on earnings quality in a sample of Vietnamese listed firms. The two dimensions of board diversity measures in this study cover a wide range of structural and demographic attributes of board of directors, using a diversity‐of‐boards index (dissimilarities among firm boards, i.e., board structure) and a diversity‐in‐boards index (dissimilarities among directors within a board, i.e., demographic attributes of board members). Earnings quality is an aggregate measure compiled from four accounting‐based measures of earnings quality: accruals quality, earnings persistence, earnings predictability and earnings smoothness. We find a significant, positive linear relationship between diversity of boards and earnings quality, while the relationship between diversity in boards and earnings quality is non‐linear, with a U‐shaped curve.     

The Predictive Ability of Dividend and Earnings Yields for Long-Term Stock Returns

We use empirical models to examine the predictive ability of dividend and earnings yields for long‐term stock returns. Results show that dividend and earnings yields share a similar predictive power for future stock returns and growth. We find that the predictive power of dividend yields increases with the return horizon, but that yields forecast future returns and growth over a much longer horizon. Finally, dividend and earnings yields exhibit high autocorrelation and strong contemporaneous relations.     

Why EVA Bonus Plans Failed—and How to Revive Them

Most companies rely heavily on earnings to measure their financial performance, but earnings growth has at least two important weaknesses as a proxy for investor wealth. Current earnings growth may come at the expense of future earnings through, say, shortsighted cutbacks in corporate investment, including R&D or advertising. But growth in earnings per share can also be achieved by “overinvesting”—that is, committing ever more capital to projects with expected rates of return that, although well below the cost of capital, exceed the after‐tax cost of debt. Stock compensation has been the conventional solution to the first problem because it's a discounted cash flow value that is assumed to discourage actions that sacrifice future earnings. Economic profit—in its most popular manifestation, EVA—has been the conventional solution to the second problem because it includes a capital charge that penalizes low‐return investment. But neither of these conventional solutions appears to work very well in practice. Stock compensation isn't tied to business unit performance, and often fails to motivate corporate managers who believe that meeting consensus earnings is more important than investing to maintain future earnings. EVA often doesn't work well because increases in current EVA often come with reduced expectations of future EVA improvement—and reductions in current EVA are often accompanied by increases in future growth values. Since EVA bonus plans reward current EVA increases without taking account of changes in expected future growth values, they have the potential to encourage margin improvement that comes at the expense of business growth and discourage positive‐NPV investments that, because of longer‐run payoffs, reduce current EVA. In this article, the author demonstrates the possibility of overcoming such short‐termism by developing an operating model of changes in future growth value that can be used to calibrate “dynamic” EVA improvement targets that more closely align EVA bonus plan payouts with investors’ excess returns. With the use of “dynamic” targets, margin improvements that come at the expense of business growth can be discouraged by raising EVA performance targets, while growth investments can be encouraged by the use of lower EVA targets.     

The Employment and Earnings Gaps between Natives and Immigrants in the UK between 1981 and 2006

We exploit the sizeable and long Lifetime Labour Market Database (LLMDB) to estimate the immigrant–native employment gap across gender, across continents of nationality and across lengths of stay in the UK between 1981 and 2006. These estimates are a novel contribution, as estimates for men and women are scarce in the literature and estimates across immigrants’ origins and lengths of stay are as yet unavailable. Furthermore, we estimate the employment gap as the differential in the number of employed weeks in the year between immigrants and natives, which has not been done before – this contrasts with the employment probability gap usually estimated in the literature. We also estimate the immigrant–native earnings gap across gender, across the entire earnings distribution, across continents of nationality and across lengths of stay. Estimates across the earnings distribution are also a novel contribution, as these are also as yet unavailable in the literature. Our main conclusion is that both the immigrant–native employment and earnings gaps vary across gender, continents of nationality and lengths of stay. Immigrant women earn more than native women throughout the distribution. The earnings gap is positive throughout for females: smaller at the bottom, larger at the top and relatively constant in the middle of the distribution. In contrast, it increases monotonically across the distribution for males: it is negative at the bottom and positive at the top. In the main, immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East, Central and South America, and Eastern Europe suffer larger employment and earnings penalties, which are reduced as their length of stay increases. In contrast, immigrants from North America have a more favourable labour market experience.     

Options trades,short sales and real earnings management

We study the link between measures of stock options’ volatility and firms’ real earnings management (RM). We hypothesise that RM causes uncertainty in the value of a firm’s common stock and, as a result, increases the volatility spread and skew of the firm’s options. Spread and skew proxy for investors’ uncertainty in the value of the options underlying a stock. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find an association between a firm’s use of RM, and the volatility spread and skew in the firm’s options, more precisely in its put options. We also study the link between short selling and the extent of RM but do not find a consistent relationship between the two.     

Can security analyst forecasts predict gold returns?

This paper examines whether security analyst earnings forecasts for firms primarily operating in the gold market can be utilised to predict returns on the price of gold. We first demonstrate that analysts are at least in part basing their earnings forecasts for gold firms on the return expectations of the gold commodity market. We show this by providing evidence that analyst coverage impounds not only market-wide and industry information, but also gold price information for these firms — as measured via its impact on stock return synchronicity. We then examine if the difference between forecast and observed earnings for these firms has predictive value for changes in the price of gold whilst controlling for a number of macroeconomic factors. We find that this difference does hold predictive power, but also has some limitations. However, there is potential for it to be used as an additional variable within gold forecasting frameworks.     

Cash-flow or return predictability at long horizons? The case of earnings yield

We examine the predictive ability of the aggregate earnings yield for both market returns and earnings growth by estimating variance decompositions at multiple horizons. Based on weighted long-horizon regressions, we find that most of the variation in the earnings yield is due to return predictability, with earnings growth predictability assuming a minor role. However, by using implied estimates from a first-order restricted VAR, we find an opposite predictability mix. The inconsistency in results stems from a misspecification of the restricted VAR. Using an unrestricted first-order VAR estimated by OLS, or alternatively, estimating the restricted VAR by the Projection Minimum Distance method, produces long-run variance decompositions that are substantially more similar to the decomposition obtained under the direct method. Hence, earnings yield is not fundamentally different from the dividend yield. These results suggest that the practice of analyzing long-run return and cash-flow predictability from a restricted VAR can be quite misleading.     

Size and Book-to-Market Factors in Earnings and Returns

We study whether the behavior of stock prices, in relation to size and book-to-market-equity (BE/ME), reflects the behavior of earnings. Consistent with rational pricing, high BE/ME signals persistent poor earnings and low BE/ME signals strong earnings. Moreover, stock prices forecast the reversion of earnings growth observed after firms are ranked on size and BE/ME. Finally, there are market, size, and BE/ME factors in earnings like those in returns. The market and size factors in earnings help explain those in returns, but we find no link between BE/ME factors in earnings and returns.     

Returns to buying earnings and book value: accounting for growth and risk

Historical cost accounting deals with uncertainty by deferring the recognition of earnings until the uncertainty has largely been resolved. Such accounting affects both earnings and book value and produces expected earnings growth deemed to be at risk. This paper shows that the earnings-to-price and book-to-price ratios that are the product of this accounting forecast both earnings growth and the risk to that growth. The paper also shows that the market pricing of earnings and book values in these ratios aligns with the risk imbedded in the accounting: the returns to buying stocks on the basis of their earnings yield and book-to-price are explained as a rational pricing of the risk of expected earnings growth not being realized. Accordingly, the paper provides a rationalization of the well-documented book-to-price effect in stock returns: book-to-price indicates the risk in buying earnings growth. However, growth identified by a high book-to-price as yielding a higher return in this paper is quite different from “growth” typically attributed to a low book-to-price as yielding a lower return. Accordingly, the notion of “growth” versus “value” requires modification.