Earnings Announcements,Differences of Opinion and Management Guidance

Berkman, Dimitrov, Jain, Koch, and Tice (2009) document a negative relationship between differences of opinion and earnings announcement returns, and this relationship is more pronounced when short‐sale constraints are likely to be high. These findings are interpreted as support for the theory in Miller (1977) that binding short sale constraints cause pessimists to be underrepresented in price formation. We conjecture that accounting information (i.e., earnings news) is likely to play a role in this returns pattern. After controlling for the level of earnings news, we find that the relationship between differences of opinion and stock returns is either eliminated or opposite from what is predicted by Miller's theory. Further, we present evidence that suggests the confounding effect of earnings news can be explained by (pessimistic) management earnings guidance. Our findings offer an alternative explanation for why low differences of opinion stocks earn greater abnormal returns around earnings announcements.     

Public Predisclosure Information, Firm Size, Analyst Following, and Market Reactions to Earnings Announcements

Abstract:   This study examines the effects of public predisclosure information on market reactions to earnings announcements. We develop an empirical measure of public predisclosure information impounded in price prior to earnings announcements by cumulating abnormal returns on public news release dates during the quarter. Consistent with prior literature, we document a negative association between this measure and market reactions to subsequent earnings announcements. Moreover, we find that after controlling for this measure, firm size and analyst following are significantly positively associated with market reactions to earnings announcements. Contrary to prior empirical evidence, our results suggest that, after controlling for actual predisclosure information impounded in price, market reactions to earnings announcements are greater in magnitude for larger, more widely-followed firms than for smaller, less widely-followed firms.     

Sell on the news: Differences of opinion,short-sales constraints,and returns around earnings announcements

Miller [1977. Risk, uncertainty, and divergence of opinion. Journal of Finance 32, 1151–1168] hypothesizes that prices of stocks subject to high differences of opinion and short-sales constraints are biased upward. We expect earnings announcements to reduce differences of opinion among investors, and consequently, these announcements should reduce overvaluation. Using five distinct proxies for differences of opinion, we find that high differences of opinion stocks earn significantly lower returns around earnings announcements than low differences of opinion stocks. In addition, the returns on high differences of opinion stocks are more negative within the subsample of stocks that are most difficult for investors to sell short. These results are robust when we control for the size effect and the market-to-book effect and when we examine alternative explanations such as financial leverage, earnings announcement premium, post-earnings announcement drift, return momentum, and potential biases in analysts’ forecasts. Also consistent with Miller's theory, we find that stocks subject to high differences of opinion and more binding short-sales constraints have a price run-up just prior to earnings announcements that is followed by an even larger decline after the announcements.     

投资者意见分歧视角下盈余公告的市场反应经验研究

本文从投资者意见分歧角度出发,研究盈余发布前后一段时间内中国股票价格行为特征,并在此基础上首次考虑公告所引发的二次意见分歧对市场反应产生的影响。研究结果表明意见分歧越高的公司,股价在公告前高估情况越严重、在公告时的下降幅度越大,二次意见分歧高的股票其超额收益较大。此外,本文还发现中国股市普遍存在盈余公告提前泄露,股价的收益特征较国外有所前移,通过进一步分析发现市场知道坏消息的时间要早于好消息。     

The Calm before the Storm

I provide evidence that stocks experiencing unusually low trading volume over the week prior to earnings announcements have more unfavorable earnings surprises. This effect is more pronounced among stocks with higher short‐selling constraints. These findings support the view that unusually low trading volume signals negative information, since, under short‐selling constraints, informed agents with bad news stay by the sidelines. Changes in visibility or risk‐based explanations are insufficient to explain the results. This evidence provides insights into why unusually low trading volume predicts price declines.     

Insider trading,future earnings,and post-earnings announcement drift

This paper examines the association between insider trading prior to quarterly earnings announcements and the magnitude of the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD). We conjecture and find that insider trades reflect insiders’ private information about the persistence of earnings news. Thus, insider trades can help investors better understand and incorporate the time-series properties of quarterly earnings into stock prices in a timely and unbiased manner, thereby mitigating PEAD. As predicted, PEAD is significantly lower when earnings announcements are preceded by insider trading. The reduction in PEAD is driven by contradictory insider trades (i.e., net buys before large negative earnings news or net sells before large positive earnings news) and is more pronounced in the presence of more sophisticated market participants. Consistent with investors extracting and trading on insiders’ private information, pre-announcement insider trading is associated with smaller market reactions to future earnings news in each of the four subsequent quarters. Overall, our findings indicate insider trading contributes to stock price efficiency by conveying insiders’ private information about future earnings and especially the persistence of earnings news.     

Too Good to be True? An Analysis of the Options Market's Reactions to Earnings Releases

Using option implied risk neutral return distributions before and after earnings announcements, we study the option market's reaction to extreme events over earnings announcements. While earnings announcements generally reduce short‐term uncertainty about the stock price, very good news does not reduce uncertainty and slightly bad news actually increases uncertainty. We also find that left tail probabilities decrease over earnings releases while right tail probabilities increase. We interpret these findings as evidence of maintained investor expectations that very good news is generally not released during earnings announcements, combined with skepticism in the form of lingering uncertainty at the release of such very good news.     

Asymmetric Trading Costs Prior to Earnings Announcements: Implications for Price Discovery and Returns

We show that the cost of trading on negative news, relative to positive news, increases before earnings announcements. Our evidence suggests that this asymmetry is due to financial intermediaries reducing their exposure to announcement risks by providing liquidity asymmetrically. This asymmetry creates a predictable upward bias in prices that increases preannouncement, and subsequently reverses, confounding short‐window announcement returns as measures of earnings news and risk premia. These findings provide an alternative explanation for asymmetric return reactions to firms' earnings news, and help explain puzzling prior evidence that announcement risk premia precede the actual announcements. Our study informs methods for research centering on earnings announcements and offers a possible explanation for patterns in returns around anticipated periods of heightened inventory risks, including alternative firm‐level, industry‐level, and macroeconomic information events.     

Mispricing firm-level productivity

This paper provides a mispricing-based explanation for the negative relation between firm-level productivity and stock returns. Investors appear to underprice unproductive firms and overprice productive firms. We find evidence consistent with the speculative overpricing of productive firms driven by investor sentiment and short sale constraints. Investors erroneously extrapolate past productivity growth and its associated operating performance and stock returns, despite their subsequent reversals. Such mispricing is perpetuated because of limits to arbitrage and is partially corrected around earnings announcements when investors are surprised by unexpected earnings news. Decomposition analysis indicates that extrapolative mispricing and limits to arbitrage explain most of the return predictability of firm-level productivity.     

Overnight public information,order placement,and price discovery during the pre-opening period

This study examines the impact of corporate news announcements released overnight on price discovery during the pre-opening period in the Australian Securities Exchange. Our results suggest that the presence of these announcements increases the efficiency of indicative opening prices and that the intensity of these announcements significantly influences the aggressiveness of pre-opening orders. Using earnings announcements to compare the speed of price adjustments in response to overnight and daytime information of a homogeneous type, we find that prices respond immediately to overnight news upon the commencement of trading, whereas adjustments based on trading-hours news tend not to be instantaneous. Overall, our evidence highlights the important role of the pre-opening period in price discovery and the prospect of further enhancing this role by timing the release of public information to occur during non-trading hours.     

Firm strategy and market reaction to earnings

We examine whether a firm's strategy affects the information content of the firm's earnings announcement. A cost leadership strategy is characterized by low sales margins coupled with large sales volumes, economies of scale and major investments in plant and physical assets, whereas a differentiation strategy involves high sales margins achieved through product quality and branding realized by investments in intangibles such as R&D and advertising. These characteristics of the strategies result in differential impact on investor reactions to new information that is revealed about firms. Our results show that firms pursuing a cost leadership strategy have earnings announcements that are more commonly interpreted and result in a greater change in the average belief about stock price. On the other hand, earnings announcements of firms pursuing a differentiation strategy result in more heterogeneous interpretation accompanied by a smaller change in the average belief about stock price. This paper advances our understanding of the cross-sectional variation in the market's reaction to earnings announcements. In addition, the paper demonstrates a predictable instance of divergence in the price reaction and trading volume reaction to an earnings announcement.     

Can Short Restrictions Actually Increase Informed Short Selling?

We use the 2008 short selling regulations to test whether short sale restrictions can increase informed short selling. For the preborrow requirement, we find more negative price reactions to short interest announcements though no reliable increase in the price impact of short sales volume. For the stocks with banned short sales, we find an increase in the price impact of short sale volume though no reliable change in the price reaction to short interest announcements. Both restrictions, however, are associated with increased informed trading. Our results suggest that short restrictions will not reduce informed short selling and may actually result in an increase by increasing the proportion of informed short sellers..     

Facebook posting activity and the selective amplification of earnings disclosures

This study examines the determinants of Facebook activity levels with a particular focus on Facebook activity around earnings announcements. Facebook activity is generally higher for firms with higher levels of analyst following, individual ownership, and trading volume, indicating that it is responsive to investor demand effects. Facebook activity also increases around earnings announcements, with the increase being largely attributable to posts containing earnings news. In general, therefore, firms use Facebook posts to amplify earnings news. Such activity is selective, however; it is lower for firms with high levels of information asymmetry, for firms reporting earnings that exactly meet the consensus analyst forecast amount, and when the earnings news is negative but the accompanying price movement is positive. Hence, firms appear to use Facebook to manage the level of attention paid to earnings news.     

Information Content and Timing of Earnings Announcements

Abstract:   The China Securities Regulatory Commission requires all listed firms to make earnings announcements by the end of April each year. This requirement creates a unique opportunity for us to evaluate the timing of earnings announcements in a four‐month cluster. Firms, which are willing to make early announcements, tend to surprise the market, as indicated by the higher volume and price reactions. Later announcements are more predictable, as indicated by the lower volume and price reactions. These results indicate that an information asymmetry exists between early and late earnings announcements in Mainland China.     

Driven to Distraction: Extraneous Events and Underreaction to Earnings News

Recent studies propose that limited investor attention causes market underreactions. This paper directly tests this explanation by measuring the information load faced by investors. The  investor distraction hypothesis  holds that extraneous news inhibits market reactions to relevant news. We find that the immediate price and volume reaction to a firm's earnings surprise is much weaker, and post-announcement drift much stronger, when a greater number of same-day earnings announcements are made by other firms. We evaluate the economic importance of distraction effects through a trading strategy, which yields substantial alphas. Industry-unrelated news and large earnings surprises have a stronger distracting effect.     

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.     

Options trading volume and stock price response to earnings announcements

We examine the effect of options trading volume on the stock price response to earnings announcements over the period 1996–2007. Contrary to previous studies, we find no significant difference in the immediate stock price response to earnings information announcements in samples split between firms with listed options and firms without listed options. However, within the sample of firms with listed options stratified by options volume, we find that higher options trading volume reduces the immediate stock price response to earnings announcements. This conforms with evidence that stock prices of high options trading volume firms have anticipated and pre-empted some earnings information in the pre-announcement period. We also find that higher abnormal options trading volume around earnings announcements hastens the stock price adjustment to earnings news and reduces post-earnings announcement drift.     

Does Shareholder Composition Matter? Evidence from the Market Reaction to Corporate Earnings Announcements

We examine whether institutional ownership composition is related to parameters of the market reaction to negative earnings announcements. When firms report earnings below analysts' expectations, the stock price response is more negative for firms with higher levels of ownership by momentum or aggressive growth investors. There is no evidence, however, that these institutions cause an “overreaction” to earnings news. Ownership structure is also related to trading volume and to stock price volatility on days around earnings announcements. Our findings are consistent with the idea that the composition of institutional shareholders effects stock price behavior around the release of corporate information.     

Information Inertia

We show that aversion to risk and ambiguity leads to information inertia when investors process public news about assets. Optimal portfolios do not always depend on news that is worse than expected; hence, the equilibrium stock price does not reflect this bad news. This informational inefficiency is more severe when there is more risk and ambiguity but disappears when investors are risk‐neutral or the news is about idiosyncratic risk. Information inertia leads to news momentum (e.g., after earnings announcements) and is consistent with low household trading activity. An ambiguity premium helps explain the macro and earnings announcement premium.     

The puzzling behavior of short sellers around earnings announcements

We examine the performance of ‘predictive’ and ‘reactive’ short sellers who take relatively large short positions immediately before and after quarterly earnings announcements, respectively. While both types short into advancing markets, it is surprising for reactive shorts since their trades are in stocks that just announced unexpected good news and thus, according to the post-earnings announcement drift anomaly, will subsequently have abnormally high cumulative returns. Nevertheless, we find that for both types of short sellers: (1) subsequent cumulative returns are significantly negatively related to the amount of abnormal short selling, suggesting they are informed, and (2) relative to non-earnings dates, the subsequent returns around earnings announcements are significantly more negative, indicating they appear to be adept at exploiting earnings announcements. Surprisingly, we find that the subsequent returns of reactive short sellers are significantly greater than those of predictive short sellers except for S&P 500 stocks, perhaps due to their greater analyst following. Importantly, we are left with two puzzles. First, reactive shorts would have significantly improved their performance had they based their trades on the size of standardized unexpected earnings (‘SUE’). Second, predictive shorts of Micro stocks would have significantly improved their performance had they simply waited until earnings were announced and then based their trades on SUE.