Second, it is possible that our measures of the distributional characteristics of reported earnings are impacted by factors that do not affect earnings opacity. For example, industry membership and growth may systematically impact the distributional characteristics of ac cruals, cash flows, and earnings, and these effects may be clear and predictable to investors, resulting in no effect on their perception of earnings opacity. As previously mentioned, we control for industry by limiting the sample to industrial firms. We control for growth by including the real GDP growth rates in all our empirical tests. These, however, may be overcontrols if the variation in the distributional characteristics of reported earnings caused by industry membership and growth do indeed affect earnings opacity.