Association between accounting performance measures and stock prices: A test of the life cycle hypothesis

Abstract This paper posits that stock market response to two accounting performance measures - sales growth and capital investment - is a function of firm life cycle stage. Firms are grouped into various life cycle portfolios using dividend payout, sales growth, and age. As predicted, the empirical results indicate a monotonic decline in the response coefficients of unexpected sales growth and unexpected capital investment from the growth to the stagnant stages. Additional analysis suggests that this relation is not driven by a firm size effect, risk differences, or measurement error in the proxies for performance measures.

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