The selection process yields 119,389 firm-year observations for NYSE, AMEX
and NASDAQ firms. 11 To control for the effects of extreme values, we remove
observations that are
(1) in the top and bottom one-half percent of either earnings-to-price or book value-to-market value,
(2) in the one-half percent of firms with the most extreme values of one-time items as a percent of income, and
(3) identified as outliers in the regressions.
To maintain comparability across tables and figures, all tests in the paper are based on the same final sample of 115,154 firm-year bservations.