The maintained hypothesis is that capital markets are informationally
efficient and the major objectives of financial reporting are generally
inferred from the FASB’s Statements of Financial Accounting Concepts.
In a
series of papers, Baruch Lev with numerous coauthors has been probably the
single biggest advocate of the ‘‘deficient GAAP’’ argument.Defici ent GAAP is
claimed to produce ‘‘low quality’’ earnings that exhibit only weak correlation
with security returns.Lev (1989, p.155) states, ‘‘While misspecification of the
return/earnings relation or the existence of investor irrationality (‘‘noise
trading’’) may contribute to the weak association between earnings and stock
returns, the possibility that the fault lies with the low quality (information
content) of reported earnings looms large.’’