Purpose: Prior studies empirically examine how financial flexibility is related to required returns by using realized returns and considering cash holdings as net debts, but they fail to find consistent results. Conjecturing that inappropriate proxy of required returns and aggregation of cash and debts caused the inconsistent results, this study revisits this topic by using a refined proxy of required returns and separating cash holdings from debts. Research design, data and methodology: This study uses a multivariate regression model to investigate the relationship between required returns on cash holdings and financial leverage. The required returns are estimated using the return decomposition method by vector autoregression model. Empirical tests use US stock market data from1968 to 2011. Results: Empirical results reveal that both cash holdings and leverage are positively related to required returns. The positive relation is stronger in economic downturns than in economic upturns. Conclusions: Three major findings are drawn. First, risky firms prefer large cash balance. Second, information shocks in the realized returns caused failure of prior studies to find consistent positive relationship between leverage and realized returns. Third, cash and leverage are related to required returns in the same direction; therefore, cash cannot be considered as negative debts.

Purpose: This study reexamines the test on the pricing of accruals quality. Theory suggests that information risk is a priced risk factor. Using accruals quality as the proxy for information risk, researchers have tested the pricing of information risk. The results are inconsistent potentially because of the information shock in the realized returns that are used as the proxy for expected returns. Based on this argument, this study revisits this issue excluding information-shock-free measure of expected returns. Research design, data and methodology: This study estimates expected returns using the vector autoregression model. This method extracts information shocks more thoroughly than the methods in prior studies; therefore, the concern regarding information shock is minimized. As risk premiums are larger in recession periods than in expansion periods, recession and expansion subsamples were used to confirm the robustness of the main findings. For the pricing test, this study uses twostage cross-sectional regression. Results: Empirical results find evidence that accruals quality is a priced risk factor. Furthermore, this study finds that the pricing of accruals quality is observed only in recession periods. Conclusions: This study supports the argument that accruals quality, as well as the pricing of information risk, is a priced risk factor.

This study investigates the influence of individual blockholder on accounting quality. Prior studies investigating Korean blockholders' influence focus on the influence of controlling shareholders or institutional investors; however, they rarely examine individual blockholders’ influence. This paper investigates how individual blockholders in Korean stock markets affect accounting quality of firms listed in Korean Stock Exchange. I analyze individual blockholders' influence on proxies of accounting quality using multivariate regression with hand-collected individual blockholder data. Korean law requires public firms to disclose the list of shareholders having no less than 5% of ownership. From the list of blockholders, individuals who have no explicit personal relation with controlling shareholders were classified as individual blockholders. My empirical results show that firms having individual blockholder(s) use more income-decreasing accruals than those having no individual blockholder. Furthermore, accounting information of firms having individual blockholders(s) is more conservative than that of firms having no individual blockholders. However, the presence of individual blockholder increases the tendency of loss avoidance and earnings management using overproduction and reduction of discretionary expenditure. This paper contributes to the literature by presenting the first evidence of the monitoring role of an individual blockholder on financial reporting of firms listed in the Korean stock markets.