Inflation Illusion and Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift

This paper examines the cross‐sectional implications of the inflation illusion hypothesis for the post‐earnings‐announcement drift. The inflation illusion hypothesis suggests that stock market investors fail to incorporate inflation in forecasting future earnings growth rates, and this causes firms whose earnings growths are positively (negatively) related to inflation to be undervalued (overvalued). We argue and show that the sensitivity of earnings growth to inflation varies monotonically across stocks sorted on standardized unexpected earnings (SUE) and, consistent with the inflation illusion hypothesis, show that lagged inflation predicts future earnings growth, abnormal returns, and earnings announcement returns of SUE‐sorted stocks. Interestingly, controlling for the return predictive ability of inflation weakens the ability of lagged SUE to predict future returns of SUE‐sorted stocks.     

How Much New Information Is There in Earnings?

We quantify the relative importance of earnings announcements in providing new information to the share market, using the R² in a regression of securities' calendar‐year returns on their four quarterly earnings‐announcement “window” returns. The R², which averages approximately 5% to 9%, measures the proportion of total information incorporated in share prices annually that is associated with earnings announcements. We conclude that the average quarterly announcement is associated with approximately 1% to 2% of total annual information, thus providing a modest but not overwhelming amount of incremental information to the market. The results are consistent with the view that the primary economic role of reported earnings is not to provide timely new information to the share market. By inference, that role lies elsewhere, for example, in settling debt and compensation contracts and in disciplining prior information, including more timely managerial disclosures of information originating in the firm's accounting system. The relative informativeness of earnings announcements is a concave function of size. Increased information during earnings‐announcement windows in recent years is due only in part to increased concurrent releases of management forecasts. There is no evidence of abnormal information arrival in the weeks surrounding earnings announcements. Substantial information is released in management forecasts and in analyst forecast revisions prior (but not subsequent) to earnings announcements.     

The Role of Accruals in Asymmetrically Timely Gain and Loss Recognition

We investigate the role of accrual accounting in the asymmetrically timely recognition (incorporation in reported earnings) of gains and losses. Timely recognition requires accruals when it precedes complete realization of the gains and losses in cash. We show that nonlinear accruals models incorporating the asymmetry in gain and loss recognition (timelier loss recognition, or conditional conservatism) offer a substantial specification improvement, explaining substantially more variation in accruals than equivalent linear specifications. Conversely, conventional linear accruals models, by omitting the loss recognition asymmetry, exhibit substantial attenuation bias and offer a comparatively poor specification of the accounting accrual process. Linear specifications also understate the ability of current earnings to predict future cash flows. These findings have implications for our understanding of accrual accounting and conservatism, as well as for researchers estimating discretionary accruals, earnings management, and earnings quality.     

Contractibility and Transparency of Financial Statement Information Prepared Under IFRS: Evidence from Debt Contracts Around IFRS Adoption

We outline several properties of IFRS that potentially affect the contractibility or the transparency of financial statement information, and hence the use of that information in debt contracts. Those properties include the increased choice among accounting rules IFRS gives to managers, enhanced rule‐making uncertainty, and increased emphasis on fair value accounting. Consistent with reduced contractibility of IFRS financial statement information, we find a significant reduction in accounting‐based debt covenants following mandatory IFRS adoption. The reduction in accounting covenant use is associated with measures of the difference between prior domestic standards and IFRS. Because IFRS adoption changed financial reporting in many ways simultaneously, it is difficult to trace the decline in accounting covenant use to individual IFRS properties, though we report larger declines in accounting covenant use in banks, which have a higher proportion of assets and liabilities that are fair‐valued. Our findings are better explained by reduced contractibility than by increased transparency, which would predict reduced nonaccounting covenant use as well, whereas we observe increases. Overall, we conclude that IFRS rules sacrifice debt contracting usefulness to achieve other objectives, such as provision of accounting information relevant to valuation.