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The paper studies the manner by which earnings expectations are met, measures the rewards to meeting or beating earnings expectations (MBE) formed just prior to the release of quarterly earnings, and tests alternative explanations for this reward. The evidence supports the claims that the MBE phenomenon has become more widespread in recent years and that the pattern by which MBE is obtained is consistent with both earnings management and expectation management. More importantly, the evidence shows that after controlling for the overall earnings performance in the quarter, firms that manage to meet or beat their earnings expectations enjoy an average quarterly return that is higher by almost 3% than their peers that fail to do so. While investors appear to discount MBE cases that are likely to result from expectation or earnings management, the premium in these cases is still significant. Finally, the results are consistent with an economic explanation for the premium placed on earnings surprises, namely that MBE are informative of the firm's future performance.

This paper finds that firms that meet or beat current analysts' earnings expectations (MBE) enjoy a higher return over the quarter than firms with similar quarterly earnings forecast errors that fail to meet these expectations. Further, such a premium to MBE, although somewhat smaller, exists in the cases where MBE is likely to have been achieved through earnings or expectations management. The findings also indicate that the premium to MBE is a leading indicator of future performance. This premium and its predictive ability are only marginally affected by whether the MBE is genuine or the result of earnings or expectations management. r 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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To better understand how equity investors influence earnings quality, we compare the quality of accounting numbers produced by two types of public firms -those with publicly-traded equity and those with privately-held equity that are nonetheless considered public by virtue of having publicly-traded debt. We develop and test two hypotheses. The "demand" hypothesis holds that earnings of public equity firms are of higher quality than earnings of private equity firms due to the stronger demand by investors and creditors stemming from, among other concerns, higher litigation risk. The "opportunistic behavior" hypothesis posits that public equity firms have lower earnings quality than their private equity peers due to management intervention in the earnings process as a result of capital market considerations as well as their own equity-based compensation. We identify a number of attributes associated with the notion of earnings quality -persistence and estimation error of accruals, prevalence of earnings management, timeliness of loss versus gain recognition (conditional conservatism) and the extent of conservatism due to the use of asset-decreasing accounting principles (unconditional conservatism). The results indicate that, consistent with the "opportunistic behavior" hypothesis, private-equity firms have higher quality accruals and a lower propensity to manage income than public equity firms. However, in line with the "demand" hypothesis, public equity firms' financial reports are generally more conservative.