The Relation between Market Values,Earnings Forecasts,and Reported Earnings*

Recently, much of the research into the relation between market values and accounting numbers has used, or at least made reference to, the residual income model (RIM). Two basic types of empirical research have developed. The “historical” type explores the relation between market values and reported accounting numbers, often using the linear dynamics in Ohlson 1995 and Feltham and Ohlson 1995 and 1996. The “forecast” type explores the relation between market value and the present value of the book value of equity, a truncated sequence of residual income forecasts, and an estimate of the terminal value at the truncation date. The analysis in this paper integrates these two approaches. We expand the Feltham and Ohlson 1996 model by including one‐ and two‐period‐ahead residual income forecasts to infer “other” information regarding future revenues from past investments and future growth opportunities. This approach results in a model in which the difference between market value and book value of equity is a function of current residual income, one‐ and two‐period‐ahead residual income, current capital investment, and start‐of‐period operating assets. The existence of both persistence in revenues from current and prior investments and growth in future positive net present value investment opportunities leads us to hypothesize a negative coefficient on the one‐period‐ahead residual income forecast and a positive coefficient on the two‐period‐ahead residual income forecast. Our empirical results strongly support our hypotheses with respect to the forecast coefficients.     

Information suppression in multi-agent contracting

This paper examines the principal??s preferences over reporting systems in multi-agent settings. In multi-agent settings, the principal??s contract offer depends on the credibility of the agents?? commitment not to collude on the terms of the contract. If the agents can credibly rule out collusion, then the principal prefers that the agents observe all performance measures and she prefers an accounting system that releases detailed instead of aggregated information. To the contrary, when the principal cannot preclude the agents from writing side contracts, it can be efficient to suppress certain information signals for contracting purposes. Specifically, restricting the information dissemination within organizations or releasing aggregated instead of detailed information are two efficient avenues to suppress information.     

Incentive Efficiency of Stock versus Options

This paper examines the relative incentive costs of using stockversus options in management incentive contracts that use market priceas the performance measure. We establish that if the manager'seffort has little or no effect on a firm's operating risk, thenthe cost of incentive risk is less using stock rather than options.However, this result is reversed if the manager's effort has asignificant impact on the firm's operating risk.     

Public Reports, Information Acquisition by Investors, and Management Incentives

This paper initially provides a general characterization of the relative weight assigned to two performance measures in an optimal linear compensation contract in a two-task principal/agent setting. This characterization is applied to a setting in which the measures are a public report about the firm's performance (e.g., accounting earnings) and its market price. The latter reflects the public report and non-contractible investor information, whose costly acquisition is endogenously determined. The analysis considers both the gross observed price and the filtered price, which excludes the effect of the public report and represents a contractible noisy measure of the investors' non-contractible information.     

Credibility Attributes and Investor Perceptions of Non‐GAAP Earnings Exclusions

Recent empirical evidence suggests that investors focus more on non‐GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) than on traditional GAAP earnings because non‐GAAP earnings are believed to proxy for a firm's ongoing profitability, a measure useful for valuation. Managers determine these non‐GAAP earnings by excluding certain items from their GAAP income. However, because these non‐GAAP earnings are both unaudited and may be disclosed by a firm to manage investors’ perceptions as opposed to inform, investors must infer the credibility of the disclosure through observable firm attributes. In this study we examine whether firms with stronger credibility attributes (corporate governance, higher‐quality auditors, and higher historical information quality) will be perceived as providing more credible non‐GAAP exclusions than those with weaker attributes. Our expectation is that the market reaction to non‐GAAP earnings exclusions of firms with stronger credibility attributes will be greater than for those with weaker attributes. Our results support our expectation.     

Reviews

Book Reviews in This Article: W. E. Wightman . The Lacy Family in England and Normandy, 1066-1194. H. S. Bennett . Life on the English Manor: A Study of Peasant Conditions, 1150-1400. Margaret Wood . The English Mediaeval House. D. Portman . Exeter Houses, 1400-1700. Patrick Collinson . The Elizabethan Puritan Movement. Calendar of the Patent Rolls. Preserved in the Public Record Office. Elizabeth I. Margaret Cash (Ed.). Devon Inventories of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. P. E. Jones (Ed.). The Fire Court: Calendar to the Judgments and Decrees of the Court of Judicature appointed to determine differences between landlords and tenants as to rebuilding after the Great Fire. G. E. Fussell . The English Dairy Farmer, 1500-1900. A. Andréadès . History of the Bank of England, 1640-1903. P. G. M. Dickson . The Financial Revolution in England. A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756. Robert Munter . The History of the Irish Newspaper, 1685-1760. W. A. Mc Cutcheon . The Canals of the North of Ireland. J. D. Williams . Audley End. The Restoration of 1762-1797. W. E. Minchinton (Ed.). Politics and the Port of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century. Stanley D. Chapman . The Early Factory Masters. The Transition to the Factory System in the Midlands Textile Industry. Phyllis Deane . The First Industrial Revolution. J. Child . Industrial Relations in the British Printing Industry. The Quest for Security. Werner von Siemens . Inventor and Entrepreneur: Recollections of Werner von Siemens. Kurt Grunwald . Türkenhirsch: A Study of Baron Maurice de Hirsch, Entrepreneur and Philanthropist. J. D. Bailey . A Hundred Tears of Pastoral Banking. A History of the Australian Mercantile Land and Finance Company, 1863-1963. F. B. Smith . The Making of the Second Reform Bill. W. R. Powell (Ed.). A History of the County of Essex. Peter Mathias . Retailing Revolution. A History of Multiple Retailing in the Food Trades based upon the Allied Suppliers Group of Companies. Marc Bloch . French Rural History: an Essay on its Basic Characteristics. J. P. Nettl . Rosa Luxemburg. Erich Gruner and Karl Frei . Die schweizerische Bundesversammlung, 1848-1920 L'Assemblée fédérale suisse, 1848-1920. Richard Colebrook Harris . The Seigneurial System in Early Canada. Geographical Study. Ashin Das Gupta . Malabar in Asian Trade, 1740-1800. David Birmingham . Trade and Conflict in Angola.     

Sequential Communication in Agencies

This paper examines a principal-agent model in which the agent receives a sequence of two signals about the future outcome from his actions. Conditions are identified under which sequential communication (signals reported when received) is strictly preferred to simultaneous communication (signals only reported after all are received). If the second signal does not provide additional information about the outcome, then it can only be valuable if its report is verified. If the first signal is informative about the second and the second provides additional information about the outcome, then there exist settings in which sequential unverified reporting is strictly valuable.     

Misleading Disclosure of Pro Forma Earnings: An Empirical Examination

The Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX) Act was passed in 2002 in response to various instances of corporate malfeasance. The Act, designed to protect investors, led to wide-ranging regulation over various actions of managers, auditors and investment analysts. Part of SOX, and the focus of this study, targeted the disclosure by firms of “pro forma” earnings, an alternate (from GAAP earnings), flexible and unaudited measure of firm performance. Specifically, SOX directed the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to craft regulation which would reduce – and preferably eliminate – any pro forma earnings disclosure which might be “misleading”. Examining earnings press releases over a 3-year period, this study addresses three questions. Were firms disclosing pro forma in a potentially misleading manner, what was the nature of this potentially misleading disclosure, and did SOX affect the disclosure practices? We find the following. In 2001 (prior to SOX), 53 firms – over 10% of all U.S. S&;P 500 firms – were disclosing pro forma earnings in a potentially misleading manner. This was being done most commonly by using traditional GAAP terminology (e.g., “net income”) in the press release headline to describe what was later in the press release revealed to be a pro forma amount (i.e., “net income excluding special items”). By 2003 (subsequent to the SEC regulation), potentially misleading disclosure practices were seen in less than 1% of the earnings press releases of S&;P 500 firms. This significant reduction suggests that managers, prior to the regulation, were either careless in their pro forma reporting practice, or were intentionally – and unethically – attempting to mislead investors. Either way, we conclude that the SEC regulation was both necessary and effective.     

Precision in Accounting Information, Financial Leverage and the Value of Equity

Abstract:  Using an equity valuation model characterized by periodic imperfect accounting information, we examine how financial leverage affects a firm's accounting quality choice (i.e., precision). We find that the existence of financial leverage motivates firms with average to good performance to prepare accounting information with a high degree of precision. However, we conclude that when a firm is performing poorly it has an incentive to reduce accounting precision in order to lower the likelihood of both a debt covenant violation and the detection of accounting bias.     

PERHAPS EVA DOES BEAT EARNINGS—REVISITING PREVIOUS EVIDENCE

In two articles, the first published in 1997 in the Journal of Accounting and Economics and the second in 1999 in this journal, Gary Biddle, Robert Bowen, and James Wallace presented evidence that reported earnings are more closely related than EVA to marketadjusted stock returns– in other words, that earnings are more “value relevant” than EVA. These papers, which are among the most widely cited in finance and accounting, fundamentally affected perceptions about the importance of EVA as a measure of corporate performance. The current article addresses a simple question: Do the Biddle, Bowen, and Wallace results continue to hold for a different set of companies, a different time period, and a different market? The authors first examined updated EVA information for different companies in the same time period examined in the Biddle, Bowen, and Wallace study. They then looked at a more recent time period (1995–1999) and a different market (the Canadian stock market), and found in all cases that “EVA has greater power than earnings in explaining marketadjusted stock returns.” Their findings validate the widespread corporate acceptance of EVA as a management tool.