Mozaffar Khan

Further Evidence on Consequences of Debt Covenant Violations

We present new evidence on debt covenant violation (DCV) consequences that have not previously been examined in the literature. In particular, we show that a DCV triggers significant information asymmetry and uncertainty on the part of shareholders and auditors as reflected in higher bid-ask spreads, return volatility, and audit fees. Further, these consequences occur even when lender-imposed costs are relatively lower, consistent with the act of default itself triggering shareholder and auditor uncertainty. The results highlight costs to the firm of having bright-line rules in contracts, and add to an understanding of the consequences of DCVs.

What Can We Conclude from Common Tests of Accrual Mispricing

Mispricing and risk have both been suggested as explanations for the cross-sectional relation between stock returns and firm characteristics such as accruals. As emphasized by Ferson and Harvey (1998) and Berk, Green and Naik (1999), it is difficult to evaluate these competing explanations without explicitly modelling the relation between risk and firm characteristics, if risk is not independent of firm characteristics. Drawing on theory and empirical evidence, this paper models systematic risk as a function of accruals, and accruals as mean-reverting. When the true abnormal returns are zero, but the true betas are unobserved by the researcher, the model predicts the anomalous pattern of empirical results previously reported in the accrual anomaly literature and attributed to mispricing: (i) CAPM abnormal returns to an accrual hedge portfolio are positive on average; (ii) the abnormal returns are positive in almost all years; (iii) abnormal returns decay as the holding period is extended beyond one year; (iv) the Mishkin (1983) test of market efficiency is rejected. Using simulations, the paper shows that small and plausible degrees of risk mismeasurement also reproduce the magnitudes of the anomalous results previously reported in the literature.

Cross-Firm Return Predictability and Accounting Quality

We examine whether cross-firm return predictability is associated with accounting quality (AQ), and find that stock returns of good AQ firms significantly positively predict one-month-ahead stock returns to industry- and size- matched poor AQ firms. In testing a delayed-information-processing mechanism behind the cross-firm return predictability, we find that: (i) Analyst earnings forecast revisions (FR) mimic the return patterns, as FR of good AQ firms significantly positively predict one-month-ahead FR of matched poor AQ firms; (ii) Cross-firm return predictability is concentrated in months with substantial news arrival, but not in no-news months; (iii) Cross-firm return predictability is stronger when the good AQ predictor firms have a richer information environment than poor AQ firms as proxied by analyst following and institutional ownership. Collectively the results uncover a new relation between accounting quality and stock return dynamics.