Earnings response coefficients of OECD banks: Tests extended to include bank risk factors

We investigate two issues: Do share prices of banks in European markets respond to unexpected accounting earnings disclosures? Are share prices as well as unexpected earnings changes correlated with bank-relevant risk factors? Results reveal that bank share prices respond to unexpected earnings changes at the time of accounting reports in the same manner as the shares of the more widely-researched non-bank firms. Apart from finding significant earnings response coefficients in eight countries, we find that credit risk, price risk, exchange rate risk, and solvency risk are significantly correlated with share price changes. Third, three bank risk factors are significantly correlated with unexpected earnings changes. These results are obtained after corrections for several statistical and econometric problems so our reported parameters are robust, certainly more so than in earlier studies using ordinary least square regressions. These new findings extend earnings response literature to several banking sectors, and also identify bank's key risk factors.     

投资者异质后验信念对股票价格影响的实证研究

过度自信程度不同的投资者因消息确认精度差异引起意见分歧,产生异质后验信念,导致投资者对股价高估或者低估。在此基础上,以盈余公告信息作为利好或利空消息,研究不同环境下异质后验信念对我国股票价格的影响。实证结果表明:不管在牛市还是在熊市环境下,异质后验信念均会对股价产生影响,当盈余公告为利好消息时,异质后验信念程度越高,当期股价被高估的程度越显著;当盈余公告为利空消息时,异质后验信念程度越高,当期股价被低估的程度越显著。此外,在盈余公告前投资者就对盈余消息作出了反映,但对好消息与坏消息的反映程度不同。     

Voluntary disclosure and the cost of equity capital: Evidence from management earnings forecasts

This paper examines the directional effects of management earnings forecasts on the cost of equity capital. We find that forecasters of bad news experience a significant increase in the cost of equity capital in the month after their disclosure. Conversely, the cost of equity capital for good news forecasters does not change significantly in the same period. We also indicate that the magnitude of changes in the cost of capital for good news forecasters is significantly lower than that for bad news forecasters and non-forecasters, which suggests that investors may view good news forecasts less credible. Finally, we show that the effect of the subsequent earnings announcement on the cost of equity capital is preempted by the management forecasts for bad news firms, and that the combined effects of the management earnings forecasts and the earnings announcement are not significant for both good news and bad news forecasters. Our paper contributes to the literature by adding evidence on directional effects of voluntary disclosures and on long-term economic consequences of management earnings forecasts.     

Religious holidays,investor distraction,and earnings announcement effects

We examine price reactions to U.S. firms’ earnings announcements during Easter week in order to analyze whether and how the religious holiday calendar impacts investors’ information processing. We find that there is an asymmetric pattern of immediate and delayed responses to earnings surprises experienced during Easter, entailing similar immediate reactions to both good and bad news and a stronger delayed response to bad news. Moreover, local religious characteristics affect investor’s response to firm news. The results are consistent with a religion-induced distraction effect on investors’ information processing ability. We also show that this effect can form the basis for a profitable trading strategy. The findings highlight the importance of religion for firms’ information environment and for the local component of stock prices.     

How Representative Are Firms That Are Cross‐Listed in the United States? An Analysis of Accounting Quality

We provide evidence on the characteristics of local generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) earnings for firms cross‐listing on U.S. exchanges relative to a matched sample of foreign firms currently not cross‐listing in the United States to investigate whether U.S. listing is associated with differences in accounting data reported in local markets. We find that cross‐listed firms differ in terms of the time‐series properties of earnings and accruals, and the degree of association between accounting data and share prices. Cross‐listed firms appear to be less aggressive in terms of earnings management and report accounting data that are more conservative, take account of bad news in a more timely manner, and are more strongly associated with share price. Furthermore, the differences appear to result partially from changes around cross‐listing and partially from differences in accounting quality before listing. We do not observe a similar pattern for firms cross‐listed on other non‐U.S. exchanges or on the U.S. over‐the‐counter market, suggesting a unique quality to cross‐listing on U.S. exchanges.     

How do the content,format, and tone of Twitter-based corporate disclosure vary depending on earnings performance?

Using 86,891 tweets, from the official corporate Twitter accounts of 715 unique firms, this study examines whether and how managers strategically attract and distract investors’ attention from corporate news through Twitter. We find that firms with good earnings news use Twitter to post more earnings-related information directly, whereas firms with bad earnings news post more non-earnings-related information on Twitter. We further find that depending on earnings performance firms strategically choose the format of tweets (qualitative or quantitative) and the tone of earnings tweets (positive or negative) to attract investors’ attention to good news or distract investors’ attention from bad news. Our results are robust to difference-in-differences (DID), alternative sample periods, and different variable specifications. Our findings provide empirical evidence for investors and regulators regarding current practices in corporate information on Twitter.     

Asymmetric information consolidation and price discovery: Inferring bad news from insider sales

Due to the paucity of sources of negative firm‐specific information, US capital markets have more difficulty identifying and incorporating bad news into stock prices than they do good news. Even though insider selling is a potentially important proxy for undisclosed bad news, researchers have difficulty ex ante identifying information‐based sales due to an inability to separate liquidity‐motivated from information‐based insider trades. We hypothesize that when insiders in multiple firms sell shares of one firm in which they are insiders and at the same time buy shares of other insider portfolio firms, the sale is more likely to be information‐based, since the proceeds are reinvested. Conversely, when an insider sells one firm without purchasing others or sells multiple insider firms the sale is likely liquidity‐motivated. We find that insider sales identified as information‐based using this algorithm are followed by significant negative abnormal returns. Information‐based sales are also more likely to be associated with delistings, earnings declines and earnings restatements. Analysts are also more likely to revise their earnings forecasts downwards for these firms. It is thus possible to ex ante identify insider sales with information content. Our results will be of interest to investors and also to regulators designing insider trading rules.     

Regulation Fair Disclosure and the timeliness of long-horizon management forecasts

We examine the effect of Regulation Fair Disclosure (hereafter Reg FD) on the timeliness of long-horizon management forecasts of annual earnings, especially those conveying bad news. We expect that managers are less timely in issuing bad news forecasts than good news forecasts prior to Reg FD when they can disclose bad news to selected analysts and institutional investors privately. As Reg FD prohibits private disclosures of material information, managers are expected to accelerate the issuance of long-horizon bad news forecasts after Reg FD due to concerns of litigation risk from institutional investors and loss of analyst coverage, leading to a decrease in timeliness asymmetry between bad news and good news forecasts. We also expect that the effect of Reg FD is stronger among firms with lower ex-ante litigation risk or higher information asymmetry as they are more likely to withhold bad news prior to Reg FD. In addition, we expect that investors and analysts react more to bad news forecasts than to good news forecasts prior to Reg FD, and this asymmetry decreases after Reg FD. Our results are consistent with our predictions and suggest that managers provide long-horizon forecasts conveying bad news more timely after Reg FD.     

Fixed income conference calls

We study the determinants and the informational role of firms' fixed income conference calls, a unique form of voluntary disclosure that deviates from the traditional multi-purpose firm disclosures intended for all stakeholders. We find that fixed income calls are more likely to be held by firms that have more debt, lack credit ratings or have publicly traded equity, are foreign, or are experiencing losses. In a content analysis using a sample of public firms, we find that these calls discuss debt-equity conflict events, such as share repurchases, to a greater degree relative to a matched sample of earnings conference calls. Finally, we document that credit markets react to these calls, consistent with the calls providing investors new information. Overall, these results are consistent with fixed income calls meeting the differential informational demands of debt versus equity investors.     

Does voluntary balance sheet disclosure mitigate post-earnings-announcement drift?

Theory suggests that balance sheet information such as total assets, total equity, or total liabilities complements earnings information in helping investors assess a firm’s profitability and estimate earnings growth. The voluntary disclosure of balance sheet information at earnings announcement could help investors gather and process this information at a lower cost. We therefore predict that voluntary balance sheet disclosure at the time of an earnings announcement helps investors promptly understand the implication of current earnings news for future earnings and subsequently reduces post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). Consistent with these predictions, our results show that when firms provide voluntary balance sheet disclosures, the earnings response coefficient in the event window is significantly higher and the corresponding PEAD is significantly lower. We further find that the impact of voluntary balance sheet disclosure on PEAD is more pronounced when the magnitude of balance sheet value surprise is larger, when balance sheet value is more informative about future earnings, when earnings uncertainty is higher, or when information cost is higher, consistent with our conjectures that helping investors to better understand future earnings performance and lowering information costs are key mechanisms underlying the effect of voluntary balance sheet disclosure on PEAD.     

The perceived credibility of forward-looking performance disclosures

We investigate the credibility of forward-looking performance disclosures (FLPDs) in the narrative sections of annual reports, as perceived by investors. Our proxy for these disclosures is an index of statements about future performance. We find that companies issue more FLPDs when raising debt or conveying bad news in the financial statements. In the presence of these managerial incentives, investor reliance on FLPDs increases with the quality of earnings reported in the audited financial statements. Our results suggest that firms derive a benefit in terms of higher credibility for their narrative disclosures from having a reputation for high quality earnings.     

The impact of public information on investors

This study investigates the trading behavior of institutional and individual investors around both firm-specific news releases in the Wall Street Journal and macro-economic announcements. For the firm-specific news releases we find that investors conduct a high degree of trading around news releases, especially earnings and dividend news. Institutions buy and sell on both good and bad news, while individual investors only trade on good news. The length of the news article (visibility) is also an important attribute to motivate individual investor trading. Lastly, both institutions and individuals buy large firms after good economic news and sell large firms after bad economic news. The trading of small firms does not appear to be motivated by macro-news.     

Trading volume in options and common stock around quarterly earnings announcements

This study examines trading in call and put options around quarterly earnings announcements and investigates whether the existence of these options affects the common stock trading volume response to these announcements. We find that the options trading volume reaction to earnings announcements is larger than the corresponding reaction in common stock. Consistent with the idea that options provide an alternative vehicle for trading on information, the existence of these options lowers the level of trading in common stock. Options also appear to offer investors an alternative method of taking short positions, as shown by the symmetric stock market trading volume reaction to good versus bad news for firms with listed options. In contrast, firms without listed options exhibit a larger trading volume response to good news than to bad news of similar magnitude.     

Accounting and Valuation: How Helpful Are Recent Accounting Rule Changes?

The longstanding debate over the proper definition of “earnings”—whether investors when setting stock prices focus primarily on GAAP earnings or other measures like operating cash flow—is both misguided and theoretically unresolvable. The biggest problem faced by investors in evaluating earnings reports is not their inability to understand the effects of the different accounting methods companies use when aggregating accounting line items into reported net income. More challenging, and more critical to the investment process, is getting complete and reliable information about the line items themselves. The authors' underlying premise is that investors, when provided sufficient information about these “components” of earnings, can combine or reconfigure them in whatever way they find most useful. But without sufficient and reliable information about the individual line items, investors will find it difficult to understand how earnings are generated and thus to produce the forecast of future earnings necessary to value a company. In the past few years, there have been significant rule changes in accounting for employee options, derivatives, and special purposes entities. The authors evaluate the extent to which the new rules encourage disclosures that are helpful from a valuation perspective. Although there has been some progress, financial reporting in each of the three areas continues to fall well short of providing the complete, disaggregated data required to value a firm with confidence.     

An Empirical Analysis of Qualitative Management Earnings Forecasts

Despite efforts by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to encourage corporate disclosure of quantitative management earnings projections, only a small fraction of firms voluntarily do so. Instead of quantitative estimates, a large number of firms choose to disclose qualitative (verbal) assessments of their earnings prospects. This paper is a study of the information characteristics and the usefulness of this alternative form of forecast disclosure to investors. The study examines a sample of qualitative forecast statements from the 1979–1985 period and finds associations between these forecasts and percentage changes in realized earnings per share, the direction of financial analysts' forecast revisions following the disclosure of these forecasts, and abnormal stock returns on the date of their disclosure. These associations are, however, shown to be more significant for negative (bad news) than for positive (good news) forecasts.     

The Impact of AASB 8 Operating Segments on Analysts’ Earnings Forecasts: Australian Evidence

This paper evaluates the impact of firms’ adoption of AASB 8 segment disclosure rules on analysts’ earnings forecasts. It examines whether providing more disaggregated segment information following the adoption of AASB 8 is associated with an increase in analysts’ ability to forecast earnings. We find that analysts’ earnings forecasts have not improved significantly after adopting AASB 8 in Australia, regardless of whether firms disclosed more disaggregated segment information. Our use of control firms provides assurance that the results are due to AASB 8 and not to some other events concurrent with the adoption of AASB 8. Overall, our results imply that the benefits associated with the management approach as experienced by financial analysts in the United States have not been realised by financial analysts in Australia. This suggests that the successful adoption of an accounting standard in one country should not be the justification for recommending adoption in other countries. Further, our results raise questions about whether the enhanced disclosures required in the new standard are more for the other users of financial statements, such as investors, rather than analysts.     

The Information Content of Segment Disclosures: Australian Evidence

This paper investigates whether the voluntary decomposition of consolidated earnings disclosures into industry segments has information content in the sense that such disclosures better enable investors to predict earnings. The broad rationale underlying the experimental design is that if segment disclosure does enable investors to better predict earnings then residual abnormal returns (after controlling for unexpected earnings) surrounding the earnings announcements of firms providing segment disclosures should on average be significantly lower than a matched' group of firms that do not provide this type of disclosure. Using a short event window design, our results support this view.     

The Impact of Statutory Sanctions on the Level and Information Content of Voluntary Corporate Disclosure

This article examines the effect of statutory civil and criminal sanctions on voluntary corporate disclosures by firms listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX). Apart from direct investigation of the quantity of voluntary disclosure, we also investigate several possible consequences of altered corporate disclosure policies, namely properties of analysts' forecasts, the degree to which share prices anticipate the information content of periodic earnings reports, and the relationship between volatility and corporate disclosures. Results suggest that, post-sanctions, any increase in voluntary disclosure is confined to smaller firms and those which performed relatively poorly. Moreover, analysts' earnings forecasts did not become more accurate or less diverse following the introduction of statutory sanctions, and there was no statistically significant increase in the weight placed on each disclosure's ability to explain return volatility. There is some evidence that share prices have anticipated earlier the value relevant components of annual periodic accounting data, although this result is again confined to smaller firms. Although the tests used are not independent and have a limited time period post-sanctions, the results cast doubt on the extent to which the imposition of substantive civil or criminal sanctions affects corporate disclosure policy.     

Do investors overreact to earnings warnings?

This study shows that contrary to what many managers argue, there is no overreaction to earnings warnings. Our sample consists of 986 firms that had significantly lower fourth-quarter earnings than analysts' forecasts during the period of 1983 to 1998. About 9% of these firms released quantitative earnings information while 6.5% of the firms disclosed qualitative earnings information prior to the formal earnings report dates. We find that although these firms experience significant stock price declines during the warning period, their share prices are still higher than the economic values, calculated using Ohlson's residual income model. Further, long-run operating and stock performance of these firms are not more positive than the performance of firms that do not warn. We also find that investor reaction to both warning and non-warning firms is positively related to the firms' long-run stock and operating performance. These findings support the argument that investors do not overreact to the warnings but base their reaction on anticipated long-term performance of the firms.     

Do brokerage houses add value? The market impact of UK sell-side analyst recommendation changes

This paper reports on the first full study investigating the economic role of sell-side analysts’ stock recommendations in the UK market. We also explore whether UK analysts are, in practice, influenced by the same biases as that reported for their US counterparts.We find that share prices are significantly influenced by analysts’ recommendation changes, not only at the time of the recommendation change but also in subsequent months. The price reaction to new sell recommendations is greater than the price reaction to new buy recommendations and exhibits post-recommendation drift which is consistent with initial underreaction to bad news. Returns generated are influenced, cross-sectionally, by factors associated with a firm's information environment and analyst incentives such as size, same-sign earnings forecast revisions and recommendation changes that skip a rank.We find that UK analysts’ investment recommendations in practice appear less susceptible to potential conflicts of interest than their US counterparts. The ratio of new sell to buy recommendations is higher in the UK and a greater proportion of such recommendations are accompanied by same-sign earnings forecast revisions than their equivalents in the US. We find brokerage house investment banking relationships do not appear to impact (adversely) on abnormal returns.