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This paper examines the predictive ability (relevance) of fair value adjustments of Canadian investment property, for future cash flow outcomes. We hypothesize and find that the fair value adjustments of more conservative firms are more predictive of future cash flows. We also find that the market prices fair value adjustments of more conservative firms at a premium as compared to those of less conservative firms. Our empirical tests control for possible self-selection of sample firms into low and high accounting conservatism groups.

We examine whether the Canadian banking sector was afflicted by financial contagion from the 2008 sub-prime crisis in the United States financial sector. We find that Canadian banks were affected by contagion, though those with higher liquidity withstood better its adverse effects. Our results indicate that Canadian banks that had more transparent asset practices appear to be less adversely affected by contagion. However, higher levels of real estate-related assets including mortgage-backed securities worsened the impact of contagion.

Little attention has been paid to a principal decision context in which analysts' earnings forecasts are prepared, namely, as an input to their recommendations. We use two data sets, Value Line, USA, and Research Evaluation Service, Canada, and examine the importance of analysts' earnings forecasts for their stock price forecasts via three hypotheses: (1) analysts' earnings forecasts are important for their stock price forecasts; (2) analysts' long-term earnings forecasts are more important than their short-term earnings forecasts for their predictions of stock prices over a particular stock price forecast horizon; (3) the importance of analysts' earnings forecasts for their stock price forecasts rises as the joint earnings and stock price forecast horizon increases. We show that: (1) when the earnings forecast horizon is the next fiscal year, forecasted earnings explain only 30% of the variation in forecasted price; (2) the importance of forecasted earnings for forecasted price rises as the earnings forecast horizon increases; (3) in the long run, (i.e. three to five years hence), forecasted earnings explain about 60% of the variation in forecasted price. Decision usefulness is an ex ante concept, but tests regarding the usefulness of earnings for stock price generally have used actual (not expectational) data. Our evidence suggests that earnings expectations are decision useful, where the decision context is sell-side analysts' stock price forecasts. Our results are potentially important to users of sell-side analyst research reports. When a stock recommendation is accompanied only by short-run earnings forecasts, investors need to closely examine estimates of non-earnings variables to assess the quality of stock recommendations. In contrast, when stock recommendations are accompanied by both short-run and long-run earnings forecasts, investors need to examine estimates of non-earnings information variables less closely.

Extant literature suggests that income smoothing, as measured by unit-free measures such as the correlation between pre-managed earnings and discretionary accruals, creates value. We recognize that income smoothing also drives up the volatility of discretionary accruals due to larger dollar amounts of smoothing efforts. We find that although the unit-free aspect of income smoothing is associated with higher future returns, the volatility aspect is associated with lower future returns. Taken together, high levels of future returns associated with the correlation measure are completely offset by negative future returns associated with the volatility measure over one-month to five-year horizons. These findings are robust to a battery of control variables and to different measures of income smoothing, and robust for industry groupings and firms adopting similar income-smoothing practices. Our results cast doubts on the ability of income smoothing to create value for shareholders over time. In particular, although the literature suggests that investors value smooth firm performance, artificially dampening the variabilities of reported earnings over time does not fool investors. Instead, income smoothing destroys value because investors are more sensitive to the increase in information asymmetry brought about by the volatility measure than to the decrease in information asymmetry brought about by the correlation measure.

Contrary to the recent literature which suggests that accrual quality predicts low returns, we find a strong and long-lasting positive relation between the accrual quality measure of Dechow and Dichev (2002) (DD) and future returns. In decile portfolios that rank on DD, a hedge portfolio that goes long in the lowest decile and short in the highest decile generates an annualized, risk-adjusted return in the order of 10% from one-month to five-year horizons.The findings are robust to common risk factors and return-informative variables and to alternative accrual quality measures, are not subsumed by transaction costs and short-sale constraints, and extend to related measures of accrual volatility. The return premiums related to DD also give rise to a DD-based factor that prices a number of Fama-French portfolios. We show that the pricing of DD is consistent with the convexity valuation of uncertainty of Pastor and Veronesi (2003), in that managers fail to improve the firm's accrual quality over time and thus impose a relatively constant degree of uncertainty for investors to learn about the firm.

This research reports that an increasing level of accounting conservatism over the 1973–2005 period is associated with (1) an increase in the ability of current earnings to predict future cash flows (a measure of relevance, e.g., Kim and Kross, 2005); and (2) a decrease in the ability of current earnings to predict future earnings (a measure of reliability in the Richardson et al. [2005] sense). We also find that usefulness of earnings for explaining stock prices over book values is positively related to reliability but not to relevance. Our results hold for the constant and full samples and in both in-sample and out-of-sample analyses and are also robust to the use of different measures for relevance, reliability, earnings usefulness, and conservatism. Our findings about the relations between conservatism, relevance, reliability, and usefulness suggest a trade-off between relevance and reliability and seem to indicate that the adoption of an increasing number of conservative accounting standards possibly has an adverse impact on earnings usefulness through their negative effects on reliability.

Under current Canadian securities regulatory requirements, public companies are able to choose whether to have their interim financial statements reviewed by external auditors on a quarter by quarter basis, but they must disclose when there has been no review performed. This differs from US practice where the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires a timely review of interim financial statements by the company’s auditor. Thus, the Canadian regulatory environment provides a natural laboratory to study the association between the determinants of voluntary reviews and earnings quality. Our study provides evidence that large and highly levered firms with independent board of directors tend to have their interim statements reviewed voluntarily. Moreover, quarterly discretionary accruals of reviewed firms are generally smaller than those of non-reviewed firms, reflecting better earnings quality. We control for possible self-selection bias in our empirical tests.

The 1991 amendment to the auditor appointment requirement of Section 86 of the Ontario Municipal Act removes certain barriers to entry into the Ontario municipal audit market. The purpose of this study is to provide evidence that the amendment has enhanced competition in this market. The results indicate that there is a general reduction in the real municipal audit fees, compared to the pre-amendment levels. However, notwithstanding the heightened competition, the Big-Six audit firms continue to command audit fee premiums over the non Big-Six audit firms. This suggests that Big-Six audit fee premiums possibly reflect brand name reputation rather than monopoly/oligopoly rents.