Does annual report readability explain the accrual anomaly?

PurposeThe purpose of the study is to investigate the possible role of annual report readability in accrual anomaly, shedding light on why investors fail to incorporate accruals information in a timely and unbiased manner beyond the original naive investor fixation explanation.Design/methodology/approachUsing five proxies of annual report readability and available data over 1993–2017, we investigate whether accrual overpricing is more severe when annual reports are less readable.FindingsWe find little (substantive) evidence of accrual overpricing among high (low) readability firms. The readability effects are contingent on the level of business complexity and earnings management.Research limitations/implicationsThis study extends the original naive investor fixation explanation and documents annual report complexity as a market friction in explaining the accrual anomaly, contributing to the mispricing vs risk debate and supporting the efficient market hypothesis.Practical implicationsLow readability of annual reports is a red flag to investors.Social implicationsThis study provides support for regulatory initiatives aimed at enhancing readability of corporate disclosures to address market frictions and improve market efficiency.Originality/valueAccrual anomaly has posed a challenge to the efficient market hypothesis. This study draws on and adds to the line of research indicating that annual report complexity is a friction erecting a barrier to transparency, hindering market efficiency. This study contributes to our understanding of the enigmatic accrual anomaly.

Zeros

Asset prices can be stale. We define price staleness as a lack of price adjustments yielding zero returns (i.e., zeros). The term idleness (respectively, near idleness) is, instead, used to define staleness when trading activity is absent (respectively, close to absent). Using statistical and pricing metrics, we show that zeros are a genuine economic phenomenon linked to the dynamics of trading volume and, therefore, liquidity. Zeros are, in general, not the result of institutional features, like price discreteness. In essence, spells of idleness or near idleness are stylized facts suggestive of a key, omitted market friction in the modeling of asset prices. We illustrate how accounting for this friction may generate sizable risk compensations in short-dated option returns. This paper was accepted by Kay Giesecke, finance.

Regulating Household Leverage

This article studies how credit markets respond to policy constraints on household leverage. Exploiting a sharp policy-induced discontinuity in the cost of originating certain high-leverage mortgages, we study how the Dodd–Frank “Ability-to-Repay” rule affected the price and availability of credit in the U.S. mortgage market. Our estimates show that the policy had only moderate effects on prices, increasing interest rates on affected loans by 10–15 basis points. The effect on quantities, however, was significantly larger; we estimate that the policy eliminated 15% of the affected market completely and reduced leverage for another 20% of remaining borrowers. This reduction in quantities is much greater than would be implied by plausible demand elasticities and indicates that lenders responded to the policy not only by raising prices but also by exiting the regulated portion of the market. Heterogeneity in the quantity response across lenders suggests that agency costs may have been one particularly important market friction contributing to the large overall effect as the fall in lending was substantially larger among lenders relying on third-parties to originate loans. Finally, while the policy succeeded in reducing leverage, our estimates suggest this effect would have only slightly reduced aggregate default rates during the housing crisis.

Employment protection legislation and entrepreneurial activity

Labour market institutions enable and constrain individual behaviour on the labour market and beyond. We investigate two main elements of national employment protection legislation and their effects upon entrepreneurial activity. We use multilevel analyses to estimate the separate impact of redundancy payments and the notice period for employers on independent entrepreneurship (self-employment) and entrepreneurial employee activity. Redundancy payments and notice period reflect labour market friction, opportunity cost, search time and liquidity constraint mechanisms contained in employment protection legislation. Country-level legislation on the notice period for employers is found to be positively related to an individual‘s involvement in entrepreneurial employee activity, yet negatively related to self-employment. We do not find consistent effects of redundancy pay legislation on entrepreneurial activity.