Please note that these projects represent the intellectual property of students like you from past classes and are not meant for circulation. They are provided as a guide to help you in thinking through your own project. Also note that, although these examples may address some accounting issues, the focus of these projects is on valuation. Your projects should focus on accounting quality.

The syllabus provides general guidelines for the project that I reproduce below.

The broad questions that a good presentation will address include:

1. What key accounting quality issues make you question your firm’s reported earnings? (use the Graham et al. paper and the Dichev et al. paper to address this question, but use other sources as well, if necessary)
2. How do your concerns relate to valuation (either positively or negatively?) Conventional wisdom suggests that companies typically manage earnings upward. That need not always be the case.
3. If the firm uses non-GAAP measures, has it used them informatively or opportunistically?

In answering these questions, you are expected to use the insights from the first four weeks of discussions in this class. That does not preclude from using what you have learned from previous coursework. In fact, I strongly encourage it, so long as it can help in answering the key questions. Use comparisons with peer firms using EDGAR / FACTSET or other publicly available sources to inform your analysis. Any analysis of earnings quality will be incomplete unless you first present a broad analysis of the company, its business model, and how reported earnings relate to that model (see attached examples of  Square).

I want you to think of the project as an opportunity to learn something new about an interesting company and share this information with the rest of the class.

The deliverable for the project is your powerpoint presentation. No separate report is required. (BUT, I need a written analysis paper for me to prepare for presentation )What that means is that the arguments in your powerpoint slides should be self-contained. You should plan on presenting for 30 minutes. You should be prepared to answer questions (from me and from other teams) during your presentation. The presentation order will be randomly determined and announced before class.