Ray Ball’s research while affiliated with University of Chicago and other places

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11142-021-09637-1

Do accruals-based earnings provide better information about future operating cash flows than do operating cash flows themselves, as predicted by the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s conceptual framework (FASB, 1978)? While this is a foundational issue in accounting, because it addresses the information added by accrual accounting methods, testing it remains unsettled. We show that when comparing the predictive ability of operating cash flows with that of an equivalent earnings measure calculated on an accrual basis, earnings outperform operating cash flows. The result becomes more pronounced when allowance is made for cross-sectional differences in the relation between firms’ earnings and future cash flows. In fact, even “bottom line” earnings then have similar explanatory power as operating cash flows.

We revisit the literature on using accounting earnings to estimate firm-level systematic risk, using macroeconomic indicators rather than listed-firm indexes to measure aggregate risk. Conventional listed-firm indexes reflect an unrepresentative subset of aggregate assets and thus are expected to substantially mismeasure aggregate and systematic risk (J Financ Econ 4, 129–176, Roll 1977). That choice dictates using earnings rather than returns to measure firm-level outcomes. Earnings and macroeconomic indicators both are primarily realized annual outcomes and thus are better aligned in time than forward-looking returns for capturing the contemporaneous co-movements that underlie systematic risk. Our macroeconomic indicators are chosen to reflect shocks to aggregate supply and demand, providing a parsimonious model that incorporates the two fundamental determinants of aggregate risk. We find that firms’ earnings-based sensitivities (betas) to aggregate supply and demand shocks are negatively correlated and explain the cross-section of returns better than conventional “index” betas. The earnings-based sensitivities are correlated with firm characteristics employed in empirical asset pricing models and explain one quarter of the explanatory power of those characteristics.

Book value of equity consists of two economically different components: retained earnings and contributed capital. We predict that book-to-market strategies work because the retained earnings component of the book value of equity includes the accumulation and, hence, the averaging of past earnings. Retained earnings-to-market predicts the cross section of average returns in U.S. and international data and subsumes book-to-market. Contributed capital-to-market has no predictive power. We show that retained earnings-to-market, and, by extension, book-to-market, predicts returns because it is a good proxy for underlying earnings yield (Ball, 1978; Berk, 1995) and not because book value represents intrinsic value.

The Editor commissioned this replication of Ball and Brown (1968) for a special issue of the Pacific-Basin Finance Journal commemorating the 50th anniversary of its publication. We also describe the background to the original paper and its research design, and offer observations on its interpretation, its impact on the literature and practice, some negative consequences, and its relation to papers published around the same time. One of the pleasing attributes of our original paper is that its results consistently replicate, the implication being that the research design and its implementation uncovered a universal relation between accounting earnings and changes in firm values. The current replication is in two dimensions: time; and geography, with an emphasis on Pacific Basin countries. In the USA and in a selection of 16 other countries, annual accounting earnings continue to contain a large proportion of the information that investors trade into share prices over the year, though not in a timely fashion. Post earnings announcement drift, the first acknowledged share market anomaly, continues today despite being reported five decades ago. One change is that reporting lags internationally have shortened on average and their range has narrowed. A notable change in USA data is that the proportion of the information incorporated in share prices that is contemporaneously incorporated in annual accounting earnings has declined, though the conclusions we draw from this decline are more cautious than in Lev and Gu (2016).