SEC filings, regulatory deadlines, and capital market consequences

SYNOPSIS: Timely disclosure of financial statement information is a critical requirement for firms and wellfunctioning capital markets. Yet, every quarter or year, a non-trivial number of firms are late in filing their financial statements. This paper identifies and probes various capital market consequences for late filings of quarterly and annual financial statements. It examines the short- and long-window reaction to late filings, as well as how equity investors process statements accompanying late filing announcements, such as managers declaring intentions to file within/outside the SEC’s allowed grace periods. This paper documents that delayed quarterly filings have distinctly different valuation implications than delayed annual filings over the short and long run, and that accounting problems play a unique role in signaling the seriousness of the delay. It also shows that investors do not accept management’s delay-related assertions at face value, and that delayed filing announcements signal continued poor performance that is not fully reflected in stock prices at the time the announcements are made. Overall, this paper sheds new light on important capital market consequences of filing financial statements late

Cost of capital and earnings transparency

We provide evidence that firms with more transparent earnings enjoy a lower cost of capital. We base our earnings transparency measure on the extent to which earnings and change in earnings covary contemporaneously with returns. We find a significant negative relation between our transparency measure and subsequent excess and portfolio mean returns, and expected cost of capital, even after controlling for previously documented determinants of cost of capital

Accounting and the Macroeconomy: The Case of Aggregate Price-Level Effects on Individual Stocks

This study sheds new light on the cross-sectional effects of inflation, which have substantial implications for stock valuation. I use financial statement analysis to examine systematic stock-valuation effects of aggregate price-level changes on individual companies, focusing on the implications for both researchers and investment practitioners. I develop inflation-adjustment procedures that are straightforward for investors to implement in real time for extracting the inflation effect on individual companies. I find that inflation-based investment strategies conditioned on information available to investors as of the initial investment and rebalancing dates result in significant risk-adjusted returns. I also investigate the sources of abnormal returns to inflation-based investment strategies. Specifically, I estimate two separate components of the inflation effect on individual companies, one based on only monetary holdings (using the net position of monetary holdings) and the other based on only nonmonetary holdings. Investigating the stock-valuation implications of extracting the components-based inflation effect reveals striking evidence. In particular, investing based on the inflation effect on companies’ net monetary holdings results in insignificant abnormal hedge returns. In contrast, investing based on the inflation effect on companies’ nonmonetary holdings consistently yields economically and statistically significant abnormal hedge returns. These findings indicate that inflation-based abnormal hedge returns are driven not by the exposure of companies’ net monetary holdings to inflation but, rather, by the exposure of their nonmonetary holdings to inflation. These results are consistent with the fact that companies’ nonmonetary holdings are usually held for several years and thus accumulate inflationary effects over time whereas their monetary holdings are, on average, naturally hedged because the exposure of monetary assets cancels the exposure of monetary liabilities for the average company. In addition, I examine the direction of the stock returns to real-time investment strategies

Inflation and Nominal Financial Reporting: Implications for Performance and Stock Prices

The monetary unit assumption of financial accounting assumes a stable currency (i.e., constant purchasing power over time). Yet, even during periods of low inflation or deflation, nominal financial statements violate this assumption. I posit that, while the effects of inflation are not recognized in nominal statements, such effects may have economic consequences. I find that unrecognized inflation gains and losses help predict future cash flows as these gains and losses turn into cash flows over time. I also find significant abnormal returns to inflation-based trading strategies, suggesting that stock prices do not fully reflect the implications of the inflation effects for future cash flows. Additional analysis reveals that stock prices act as if investors do not fully distinguish monetary and nonmonetary assets, which is fundamental to determining the effects of inflation. Overall, this study is the first to show that, although inflation effects are not recognized in nominal financial statements, they have significant economic consequences, even during a period in which inflation is relatively low

The Influence of a Firms\u27 Business Strategy on the Downside Risk of Earnings, Accruals and Cash Flow

This study examines whether a firm\u27s business strategy is an underlying determinant of downside risk in accounting earnings and its components. Based on organizational theory we predict that firms following an innovative prospector strategy exhibit lower profitability tendencies than firms following a cost-oriented defender strategy. Further, we anticipate that these strategies are asymmetrically positioned towards environmental uncertainty, with defenders focusing their efforts to efficiency, cost control, and minimizing exposure to downside risk, whereas prospectors direct their resources to flexibility, innovation, and maximizing the growth potential through aggressive expansion to new product markets. We find that prospectors are indeed less profitable than defenders. We also demonstrate that prospectors have greater total and downside earnings risk. Finally, we decompose earnings into accruals and cash flow and show that the higher exposure of prospectors to earnings downside risk is driven by the cash flow component rather than the accrual component. Collectively, our results suggest that considering how strategy interacts with financial reporting attributes is a useful way for evaluating a firms\u27 risk profile

Inflation and Nominal Financial Reporting: Implications for Performance and Stock Prices

The monetary unit assumption of financial accounting assumes a stable currency (i.e., constant purchasing power over time). Yet, even during periods of low inflation or deflation, nominal financial statements violate this assumption. I posit that, while the effects of inflation are not recognized in nominal statements, such effects may have economic consequences. I find that unrecognized inflation gains and losses help predict future cash flows as these gains and losses turn into cash flows over time. I also find significant abnormal returns to inflation-based trading strategies, suggesting that stock prices do not fully reflect the implications of the inflation effects for future cash flows. Additional analysis reveals that stock prices act as if investors do not fully distinguish monetary and nonmonetary assets, which is fundamental to determining the effects of inflation. Overall, this study is the first to show that, although inflation effects are not recognized in nominal financial statements, they have significant economic consequences, even during a period in which inflation is relatively low

A review of short-term event studies in operations and supply chain management

The short-term event study method, grounded in the Efficient Market Hypothesis, is one of the most widely used tools for quantifying the impact of a specific event on a firm's shareholder value. As the short-term event study method has been increasingly employed by researchers to investigate various operations and supply chain management (OSCM) events, it is timely to conduct a systematic review of the method to examine how it has been implemented in the OSCM literature and what could be improved to deploy it for future OSCM research. Analyzing 29 short-term event studies published in renowned OSCM journals between 1995 and 2017, we find that OSCM researchers generally follow the standard procedures in conducting event studies, but pay less attention to some methodological issues ranging from addressing the confounding events to expanding the event windows. Based on our analysis, we provide several recommendations for future event studies in OSCM, such as the opportunity for studying external events in the non-U.S. context, the caution of expanding the event windows, and the need to deal with the self-selection bias