Julia Nasev examines the impact of conservative accounting numbers on valuation estimates and on real economic decisions such as cost stickiness.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Valuation is at the heart of investing. A considerable part of the information for valuation is in the financial statements.Financial Statement Analysis and Security Valuation, 5 e by Stephen Penman shows students how to extract information from financial statements and use that data to value firms. The 5th edition shows how to handle the accounting in financial statements and use the financial statements as a lens to view a business and assess the value it generates.

We review and critically examine the standard approach to equity valuation using a constant risk-adjusted cost of capital, and we develop a new valuation approach discounting risk-adjusted fundamentals, such as expected free cash flows and residual operating income, using nominal zero-coupon interest rates. We show that standard estimates of the cost of capital, based on historical stock returns, are likely to be a significantly biased measure of the firm's cost of capital, but also that the bias is almost impossible to quantify empirically. The new approach recognizes that, in practice, interest rates, expected equity returns, and inflation rates are all stochastic. We explicitly characterize the risk-adjustments to the fundamentals in an equilibrium setting. We show how the term structure of risk-adjustments depends on both the time-series properties of the free cash flows and the accounting policy. Growth, persistence, and mean reversion of residual operating income created by competition in the product markets or by the accounting policy are key determinants of the term structure of risk-adjustments.

This review lays out a research perspective on earnings quality. We provide an overview of alternative definitions and measures of earnings quality and a discussion of research design choices encountered in earnings quality research. Throughout, we focus on a capital markets setting, as opposed, for example, to a contracting or stewardship setting. Our reason for this choice stems from the view that the capital market uses of accounting information are fundamental, in the sense of providing a basis for other uses, such as stewardship. Because resource allocations are ex ante decisions while contracting/stewardship assessments are ex post evaluations of outcomes, evidence on whether, how and to what degree earnings quality influences capital market resource allocation decisions is fundamental to understanding why and how accounting matters to investors and others, including those charged with stewardship responsibilities. Demonstrating a link between earnings quality and, for example, the costs of equity and debt capital implies a basic economic role in capital allocation decisions for accounting information; this role has only recently been documented in the accounting literature. We focus on how the precision of financial information in capturing one or more underlying valuation-relevant constructs affects the assessment and use of that information by capital market participants. We emphasize that the choice of constructs to be measured is typically contextual. Our main focus is on the precision of earnings, which we view as a summary indicator of the overall quality of financial reporting. Our intent in discussing research that evaluates the capital market effects of earnings quality is both to stimulate further research in this area and to encourage research on related topics, including, for example, the role of earnings quality in contracting and stewardship.