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Prior literature suggests that stock prices lead earnings in reflecting value-relevant information because accounting income incorporates information discretely to satisfy recognition principles while stock prices incorporate it continuously. The purpose of this paper is to derive an analytical model that relates the time lag of earnings to the incremental informativeness of future anticipated earnings in equity prices after controlling for current realized earnings.

This study models the extent to which forward-looking information about future earnings is capitalized into current stock returns. Specifically, this study derives an analytical future earnings response coefficient (FERC) model that regresses current stock returns on both current and future earnings surprises, and examines the properties of the regression coefficients on current earnings (i.e. current earnings response coefficient, CERC) and future earnings (i.e. FERC).

The analytical FERC model shows that the pricing coefficient on future earnings (FERC) is positive in the presence of stock prices leading earnings. More importantly, the pricing coefficient on future earnings (FERC) increases with the recognition lag, but the pricing coefficient on current earnings (CERC) decreases with the lag. The results suggest that recognition principles that intend to enhance the reliability of earnings inadvertently lower the timeliness of earnings and, thus, shift the investors’ demand for value-relevant information from current realized earnings to future anticipated earnings.

This study makes two major contributions. First, it fills the gap between the lack of an analytical model and the abundance of empirical findings in previous FERC studies. As the recognition lag of earnings increases, stock investors shift the pricing weight on value-relevant information from current realized earnings to future anticipated earnings. Second, it provides support for the validity of the FERC model as an empirical model that examines the lack of earnings timeliness. As the timeliness of earnings relative to stock prices declines, the FERC increases but the CERC decreases.

The existing literature has established the importance of industry concentration in explaining firm performance and information environments. However, little is known about whether and how industry concentration affects investors’ ability to anticipate future earnings. This paper aims to investigate this query by identifying and testing two channels, product market power and intra-industry information transfer, through which industry concentration affects the informativeness of stock returns about future earnings.

The paper measures the informativeness of stock returns about future earnings by the future earnings response coefficient (FERC)). This study estimates the FERC using a firm-level sample from 38 economies.

The authors find that industry concentration significantly enhances investors’ ability to predict future earnings. Further tests show that both product market power and intra-industry information transfer contribute to explaining the positive association between industry concentration and the FERC, with the former playing a more salient role. Finally, the authors show that a country’s effective competition law attenuates the positive impact of industry concentration on the FERC by weakening the economic impact of the two underlying channels.

This study contributes to the growing literature on the price-leading-earnings relation, industry concentration and international corporate governance.

A firm’s ethical behavior is commonly perceived beneficial to the firm and its investors in the literature. However, activities of corporate social responsibility (CSR) are often delivered with multiple purposes, and their expenses are aggregated with other expenditures in financial statements. These two features motivate the authors to hypothesize and find that investors’ ability to predict future earnings of ethical firms may not be improved through observing the CSR activities. The study aims to suggest that CSR spending should be expressed separately from other expenses in financial reports to help investors predict the future performance of CSR firms.

The authors use future (forward) earnings response coefficients (FERC) to testing whether current stock returns reflect correct information about future earnings. The basic specification of FERC framework, initially developed by Collins et al. (1994), is a regression of current-year stock returns on past, concurrent and future reported earnings with future stock returns as a control variable. A significantly positive FERC provides evidence that investors have rich and correct information about future earnings.

The authors find less future earnings information contained in current stock returns for firms with higher intensity of CSR activities. The association is also negative between current stock returns and future earnings reported by firms with a higher degree of CSR spending aggregated with selling, general and administrative expenses (SG&A). In additional analyses, the intensity of CSR activities is positively associated the uncertainty of benefits, measured by the standard deviation of future earnings over the next five years. This future earnings variability does not exist, even though CSR spending is aggregated with SG&A, consistent with the basic principle that accounting expenses create no future economic impacts.

The authors contribute to the current debate over consequences of CSR activities and accounting for CSR spending from a different angle. A common belief is that voluntary disclosure on CSR activities would aid in reducing costs of equity capital and financial reporting errors. These studies provide corporate managers with good reasons and motivations to expect beneficial consequences of voluntary disclosure. The results show that general investors are less capable of predicting future earnings when there is a higher degree of CSR spending aggregated with SG&A. It also highlights potential problems in the disclosure of general-purpose financial reporting to accounting standard setters.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether income smoothing does indeed improve the informativeness of stock prices about firms' future earnings and cash flows. Also an approach to studying the effects of income smoothing is presented.

This study uses data from 1992‐2006 and runs regressions on each of the 560 industry‐year cross‐sections. The data compiled from the financial statements of firms were collected for each year available from the Tehran Stock Exchange database. Income smoothing is defined as the management of accruals to reduce time‐series variation in income, and uses a cross‐sectional version of the Jones model, modified by Kothari, Leone and Wasley. Smoothing is measured as the variation of net income relative to the variation in CFO, or the correlation between changes in accruals and changes in CFO. Informativeness is measured as the coefficient on future earnings (cash flows) in a regression of current stock return against current and future earnings (cash flows and accruals).

The findings suggest that income smoothing enhances the information content of the effect of stock price on future earnings, thus improving the ability of market participants to make informed decisions about the allocation of capital resources.

Although previous research on the subject of income smoothing in an emerging market has been documented, its effect on stock prices efficiency is largely unknown. Thus, this paper presents an approach to studying the effects of income smoothing and the knowledge that the ability to manage earnings could improve stock prices efficiency could be useful for academics and policymakers in this market.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the value‐relevance of regulatory financial reporting requirements for jurisdictional public utilities, natural gas companies and oil pipelines in the USA.

An event study methodology is used to examine the stock market's response to regulatory accounting and reporting requirements. Also, the explanatory power of regulatory disclosures pertaining to fair values of on‐balance sheet derivatives is tested.

The empirical findings suggest the market responded favorably to the regulatory requirements, and the accounting and reporting changes are perceived as useful to investors in equity valuation.

This study extends the prior research by addressing the value relevance of disaggregated disclosures for on‐balance sheet derivatives. The results are generalizable to other standard setting environments, particularly in foreign markets that have experienced rapid growth in derivatives markets in recent years.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how corporate environmental reputation (CER) affects the association between current annual stock returns and current and future annual earnings. In particular, it seeks to examine the potential usefulness of CER to investors in predicting future earnings.

The paper uses the returns‐earnings regression model introduced by Collins et al. to examine the importance of CER for investors. It uses a sample of 889 non‐financial firms listed on the London Stock Exchange from 1996 to 2004.

The paper finds that firms with higher levels of CER scores exhibit higher levels of share price anticipation of earnings than firms with lower levels of CER scores.

This paper is the first direct evidence that CER contains value‐relevant information. Such information is potentially useful to investors in anticipating future earnings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of corporate internationalization, governance structures, and legal protections on the foreign earnings response coefficient (FERC). The FERC is a measure of the value‐relevance of foreign earnings.

Data were collected on 3,653 Taiwanese firms which had overseas investments. The authors examined the impact of the site of their overseas investments and the nature of the legal code of the investee country on the investor perceptions of firms' reported foreign and domestically‐generated earnings. Also examined was the impact of corporate governance arrangements (e.g. the difference between the owners' cash flow and voting rights) on the same components of the firms' earnings.

The empirical findings suggest that an aggressive internationalization strategy (foreign direct investment) has positive effects on the value relevance of foreign earnings, but that this strategy is impacted by the firm's own corporate governance arrangements and the target of its overseas investment efforts. While foreign investments bring about growth and profits, they expose the investors to the risk of expropriation by investee countries and corporate insiders.

The importance of the findings is that they should help regulatory agencies – and firms themselves – to better understand factors that can promote the global expansion of domestic enterprises.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of audit quality, measured by financial statements audited by the big four accounting firms, on the investors' ability to predict future earnings for profitable and unprofitable firms.

The paper uses the returns‐earnings regression model and interacts all independent variables in this model with a dummy variable, AUDIT, which is set to equal one if financial statements audited by the big four accounting firms, zero otherwise. Future earnings response coefficient is the measure of earnings predictability.

The paper finds that investors are able to better anticipate future earnings when financial statements are audited by the big four accounting firms. However, the findings are not applicable for unprofitable firms.

The findings of the paper have implications for auditing related academic research and the users of financial statements. In particular, the study shows that the big four accounting firms have not lost their audit quality advantage and that financial statements audited by the big four accounting firms are arguably of higher quality than those audited by non‐big four accounting firms.

It is believed that there is no UK study to date examining the association of the quality of financial statements audited by the big four accounting firms and the returns‐earnings association. Consequently, this paper significantly contributes to the limited literature on the perceived value relevance of audit quality.

The purpose of this study is to describe the development of market based accounting research (MBAR) published in Indonesia for 10 years. This study attempts to explain the topics of MBAR, research method used, the variables, between-variable relationship formed, and the units analysis used in MBAR. This research uses qualitative-descriptive method to create descriptive models of MBAR articles published in accounting journals that have been accredited with minimum grade of B. The analysis of 109 MBAR articles of five accounting journals shows that 10 MBAR themes are still potential. Among three methods in MBAR, the multivariate association study is dominant. Some papers use intervening and moderating model to explore the relationship between accounting data and capital market reaction. The results for each theme are described in a research map that shows the relationship between variables (constructs) of MBAR from three units of analysis. This paper finds some implications to MBAR research agenda in the future, especially for meta-analysis research and triangulation research, due to many inconsistencies of the MBAR findings in Indonesia. In addition, accounting standard research topic is still promising in the moment of accounting standards transition.

National cultures significantly explain cross-country differences in the relation between asset growth and stock returns. Motivated by the notion that managers in individualistic and low uncertainty-avoiding cultures have a higher tendency to overinvest, this study aims to show that the negative relation between asset growth and stock returns is stronger in countries with such cultural features. Once the researchers control for cultural dimensions, proxies associated with the q-theory, limits-to-arbitrage, corporate governance, investor protection and accounting quality provide no incremental power for the relation between asset growth and stock returns across countries. Evidence of this study highlights the importance of the overinvestment hypothesis in explaining the asset growth anomaly around the world.