the findings of Francis et al.
[2005] suggest that earnings quality is priced; relative to the cash flow component
of earnings, accounting accruals are more prone to management
discretion and manipulation, implying less private information may be preempted
by earnings announcements; earnings quality is a ubiquitous construct
that applies to all publicly traded firms; and unlike the probability of
informed trading measure used by Easley, Hvidkjaer, and O’Hara [2002], an
indirect measure of a firm’s information asymmetry derived from trade data,
earnings quality is a relatively more direct measure of a firm’s information
environment derived from fundamental accounting data contained in its
financial statements.