Ball and Brown (1968): A Retrospective

Abstract

This essay provides a retrospective view on our co-authored paper, Ball and Brown (1968). The retrospective was commissioned by Gregory Waymire, then President of the American Accounting Association. It describes how we both came to be PhD students at the University of Chicago and set about researching the relation between earnings and share prices. It outlines the background against which we conducted the research, including the largely a priori accounting research literature at the time and the electric atmosphere and radical new ideas then in full bloom at Chicago. We describe some of the principal research choices we made, and their strengths and weaknesses. We also describe the reception our research received and how the related literature subsequently unfolded.

Keywords: Ball-Brown, earnings, usefulness, timeliness, anomalies, event study

JEL Classification: B30, G14, M41