The Information Content of Earnings in a Discretionary Reporting Environment: Evidence from NYSE Industrials, 1905-10
研究1905-10年纽交所51家工业公司年报发布前后的股价行为，当时几乎没有政府披露要求和审计规定，会计技术也很原始，为理解无强制披露环境下的盈余信息含量提供了历史证据。
This paper provides evidence on stock price behavior associated with annual earnings reports by 51 industrial corporations traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) during 1905-10. These firms were subject to virtually no government-imposed disclosure requirements (see Hawkins [1963]) and only minimal exchange requirements. While NYSE-listed firms were required to disclose annual earnings, there were no restrictions on accounting methods and no audit requirements. Moreover, these requirements could be avoided if the shares were traded on the NYSE as unlisted securities.1 In addition, the accounting and auditing technologies of this era were rudimentary (see Edwards [1960] and Previts and Merino [1979]). There were no external accounting and auditing guidelines and external audits were far