Selective Trading of Available-for-Sale Securities: Evidence from U.S. Commercial Banks

This paper examines the selective trading of available-for-sale (AFS) securities by U.S. banks after the implementation of fair value accounting under Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 115, Accounting Standards Codification Topic 320. Our findings suggest firms still engage in earnings management through selective selling of AFS securities despite the mandatory disclosure of unrealized security holding gains and losses in their financial statements. Such activities do not appear to be driven by the lack of reliability of the fair value measure. Instead, the degree of earnings management varies significantly with the reporting format of unrealized AFS security holding gains and losses. We find evidence of earnings management among banks that choose to report unrealized holding gains and losses in the statement of shareholders’ equity. By contrast, we find no such evidence among banks disclosing unrealized holding gains and losses in the income statement.     

Connecting book rate of return to risk and return: the information conveyed by conservative accounting

Review of Accounting Studies - This paper revises the standard interpretation of the book rate of return as a measure of profitability. Rather, due to conservative accounting, the book rate of...     

声誉激励：公务员激励机制的新思维

有效的激励与约束机制能够解决公务员的败德行为,声誉激励是其中一个有效的制度安排.在国内外学者研究的基础上,建立一个简单的博弈模型,研究发现公务员声誉激励机制必须满足具有长远预期、完备的信息传播渠道等四个条件,同时根据现阶段我国公务员声誉激励失效的原因,有针对性地提出了完善公务员职务晋升制度、充分发挥公务员声誉激励等政策建议.     

Information relevance, reliability and disclosure

This paper examines the relation between information’s properties, such as reliability and relevance, and public disclosure policy. It shows that the optimal accounting system often involves a carefully balanced combination of mandatory and voluntary disclosure, with mandatory reporting focused on more reliable information. The emphasis on reliability causes the welfare-maximizing mandatory report to consistently lag behind the financial market in incorporating value-relevant information.     

变换域数字图像水印算法探究

随着数字水印技术的发展,数字图像水印算法便层出不穷.本文首先将数字水印算法从实现的角度分为空间域算法和变换城算法两大类,然后对变换域的算法从离散余弦变换(DCT)、离散傅立叶变换(DFT)、小波变换、分形变换及倒谱变换等方面检索了相关文献,对各种算法进行了尝试性分析和探讨.     

Preserving amortized costs within a fair-value-accounting framework: reclassification of gains and losses on available-for-sale securities upon realization

SFAS No. 115 requires firms to recognize available-for-sale (AFS) securities at fair value with accumulated unrealized gains and losses (AUGL) recorded in accumulated other comprehensive income. Firms reclassify AUGL to net income when they realize gains and losses. We refer to the amount reclassified each period by “RECLASS.” As of 1998, SFAS No. 130 requires firms to present RECLASS prominently in their financial statements. We investigate the incremental explanatory power of RECLASS for banks’ market values and market-adjusted returns. In the market value analysis, we control for AUGL, other components of book value of equity, net income before extraordinary items and RECLASS (NIBEX^other), and other components of comprehensive income. In the returns analysis, we control for ΔAUGL, ΔNIBEX^other, and extraordinary items. We find high positive coefficients on RECLASS in both analyses, consistent with investors pricing RECLASS as a relatively permanent component of net income. Exploring possible explanations for these pricing implications, we find no evidence that they are attributable to RECLASS remedying unreliable fair value measurement of AUGL. We provide three distinct analyses indicating that RECLASS’s pricing implications are explained in significant part by it helping investors predict banks’ future performance. Our results illustrate that an important type of amortized cost accounting information, realized gains and losses, remains highly useful to investors despite the overall fair-value-accounting framework for AFS securities.     

Back to Basics: Forecasting the Revenues of Internet Firms

This paper examines the roles played by past revenues, web usage data, and analysts in forecasting the future revenues of internet firms during the years 1998 to 2000. For this time period our analysis shows that estimates of web traffic growth have significant incremental value in the prediction of revenues above time-series forecasts. Furthermore, analysts almost always underestimate the revenues of internet firms. Historical revenue growth has incremental predictive power over analysts' forecasts for portal and content/community firms, but not for our e-tailer sample. Moreover, the stocks of the portal and content/community firms with high historical revenue growth earn higher abnormal returns during our sample period than do those with low historical growth. Estimates of web usage growth generally do not have incremental value over analysts' forecasts for predicting the revenues of either set of firms. However, perfect foreknowledge of actual web usage growth would provide incremental predictive power. Collectively, our findings point to the potential value for forecasting purposes of both improving upon the web usage estimates and obtaining more timely reports of actual web traffic.     

Discussion of “Excess Returns to R&D-Intensive Firms”

Review of Accounting Studies -     

国有公司控制权私人收益的悖论与立法选择

控制权私人收益问题伴随公司法人制度的产生而出现,并日益成为公司治理上的一个难题.国外有关控制权私人收益的探讨和立法规则很少针对国有公司,因而国外的理论和经验用于分析中国的国有公司往往难以获得令人信服的结论.围绕着中国国有公司控制权私人收益问题,出现了高度集中的股权结构却产生了内部人控制、激励机制加剧控制权私人收益、否认控制权私人收益将不利于公司的长远发展这三个逻辑上的悖论,从而在理念和现实两个方面都导致中国国有公司的治理困局.解决问题的关键在于,必须正视中国国有公司在价值目标和市场地位等方面的独特秉性,立法上对因内部人控制而产生的控制权私人收益问题则不能有丝毫的迁就.     

Mixing fair-value and historical-cost accounting: predictable other-comprehensive-income and mispricing of bank stocks

Other comprehensive income (OCI) items are often considered to be transitory (Chambers et al. 2007; IASB 2013; CFA2014). In this paper, we show that a significant portion of OCI, namely unrealized gains and losses (UGL) from available-for-sale (AFS) debt securities, is non-transitory: a negative correlation between accumulated unrealized gains and losses in the current period and next period UGL is predicted, and we show that this correlation is economically and statistically significant. This correlation is due to a mix of accounting methods of measurement of income from fixed-income securities: UGL are recognized based on fair values, whereas interest income is measured based on historical cost. We document that (1) this negative correlation helps explain a previously unexplained negative correlation in other comprehensive income (OCI), and (2) investors seem to price total UGL disregarding (or not understanding) the predictable, accounting-driven component of UGL.