Inflation,earnings forecasts,and post-earnings announcement drift

We examine whether financial analysts fully incorporate expected inflation in their earnings forecasts for individual stocks. We find that expected inflation proxies, such as lagged inflation and inflation forecasts from the Michigan Survey of Consumers, predict the future earnings change of a portfolio long in high inflation exposure firms and short in low or negative inflation exposure firms, but analysts do not fully adjust for this relation. Analysts’ earnings forecast errors can be predicted using expected inflation proxies, and these systematic forecast errors are related to future stock returns. Overall, our evidence is consistent with the Chordia and Shivakumar (J Account Res 43(4):521–556, 2005) hypothesis that the post-earnings announcement drift is related to investor underestimation of the impact of expected inflation on future earnings change.     

Are good-news firms riskier than bad-news firms?

This paper examines the relative risk of good-news firms, i.e., those with high standardized unexpected earnings (SUE), and bad-news (low SUE) firms using a stochastic discount factor approach. We find that a stochastic discount factor constructed from a set of basis assets helps explain post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). The risk exposures on the pricing kernel increase monotonically from the lowest to highest SUE sorted portfolios. Specifically, good-news firms always have higher risk exposures than bad-news firms in both 10 SUE sorted portfolios and 25 size and SUE sorted portfolios. However, the estimated expected risk premium is too small to explain the observed magnitude of returns on the PEAD strategy. Our risk adjustment can explain only about one-fourth of the total magnitude of the average realized return to the PEAD strategy. As a result, the average risk-adjusted returns of earnings momentum strategies are mostly positive and significant. Overall, our results support the view that at least some portion of the returns to the earnings momentum strategies examined represent compensation for bearing increased risk.     

Earnings Announcements and Systematic Risk

Firms scheduled to report earnings earn an annualized abnormal return of 9.9%. We propose a risk‐based explanation for this phenomenon, whereby investors use announcements to revise their expectations for nonannouncing firms, but can only do so imperfectly. Consequently, the covariance between firm‐specific and market cash flow news spikes around announcements, making announcers especially risky. Consistent with our hypothesis, announcer returns forecast aggregate earnings. The announcement premium is persistent across stocks, and early (late) announcers earn higher (lower) returns. Nonannouncers' response to announcements is consistent with our model, both over time and across firms. Finally, exposure to announcement risk is priced.     

Individual Investor Trading and Return Patterns around Earnings Announcements

This paper provides evidence of informed trading by individual investors around earnings announcements using a unique data set of NYSE stocks. We show that intense aggregate individual investor buying (selling) predicts large positive (negative) abnormal returns on and after earnings announcement dates. We decompose abnormal returns following the event into information and liquidity provision components, and show that about half of the returns can be attributed to private information. We also find that individuals trade in both return‐contrarian and news‐contrarian manners after earnings announcements. The latter behavior has the potential to slow the adjustment of prices to earnings news.     

Aggregate Market Reaction to Earnings Announcements

This analysis identifies a distinct immediate announcement period negative relation between earnings announcement surprises and aggregate market returns. Such a relation implies that market participants use earnings information in forming expectations about expected aggregate discount rates and, specifically, that good earnings news is associated with a positive shock to required returns. Consistent with this interpretation we find that Treasury bond rates and implied future inflation expectations respond directly to earnings news. We also find some evidence that the negative relation between earnings news and market return persists beyond the immediate announcement period, suggesting that market participants do not immediately fully impound these future market return implications of aggregate earnings news.     

Earnings and price momentum

This paper examines whether earnings momentum and price momentum are related. Both in time-series as well as in cross-sectional asset pricing tests, we find that price momentum is captured by the systematic component of earnings momentum. The predictive power of past returns is subsumed by a zero-investment portfolio that is long on stocks with high earnings surprises and short on stocks with low earnings surprises. Further, returns to the earnings-based zero-investment portfolio are significantly related to future macroeconomic activities, including growth in GDP, industrial production, consumption, labor income, inflation, and T-bill returns.     

Volatility spreads and earnings announcement returns

Prior research documents that volatility spreads predict stock returns. If the trading activity of informed investors is an important driver of volatility spreads, then the predictability of stock returns should be more pronounced during major information events. This paper investigates whether the predictability of equity returns by volatility spreads is stronger during earnings announcements. Volatility spreads are measured by the implied volatility differences between pairs of strike price and expiration date matched put and call options and capture price pressures in the option market. During a two-day earnings announcement window, the abnormal returns to the quintile that includes stocks with relatively expensive call options is more than 1.5% greater than the abnormal returns to the quintile that includes stocks with relatively expensive put options. This result is robust after measuring volatility spreads in alternative ways and controlling for firm characteristics and lagged equity returns. The degree of announcement return predictability is stronger when volatility spreads are measured using more liquid options, the information environment is more asymmetric, and stock liquidity is low.     

A Test of the Errors–in–Expectations Explanation of the Value/Glamour Stock Returns Performance: Evidence from Analysts' Forecasts

Several empirical studies show that investment strategies that favor the purchase of stocks with low prices relative to conventional measures of value yield higher returns. Some of these studies imply that investors are too optimistic about (glamour) stocks that have had good performance in the recent past and too pessimistic about (value) stocks that have performed poorly. We examine whether investors systematically overestimate (underestimate) the future earnings performance of glamour (value) stocks over the 1976 to 1997 period. Our results fail to support the extrapolation hypothesis that posits that the superior performance of value stocks is because investors make systematic errors in predicting future growth in earnings of out–of–favor stocks.     

Good News for Value Stocks: Further Evidence on Market Efficiency

This article examines the hypothesis that the superior return to so-called value stocks is the result of expectational errors made by investors. We study stock price reactions around earnings announcements for value and glamour stocks over a 5-year period after portfolio formation. The announcement returns suggest that a significant portion of the return difference between value and glamour stocks is attributable to earnings surprises that are systematically more positive for value stocks. The evidence is inconsistent with a risk-based explanation for the return differential.     

Are short sellers incrementally informed prior to earnings announcements?

Contrary to the hypothesis that informed short sellers increase their positions prior to earnings announcements, we find that short activity declines in the pre-announcement period compared with activity in non-announcement time. This statistically significant, but economically modest, decline may suggest that the fraction of informed short sellers actually increases if (as Diamond and Verrecchia (1987) suggest) the uncertainty around earnings announcements increases short selling costs and causes uninformed short sellers to withdraw from the market. While we find a statistically and economically significant inverse relation between pre-announcement short activity and announcement period returns, when we control for the non-announcement ability of short sellers to predict future returns documented by Diether et al. (2009), the significance of the relation between pre-announcement short activity and announcement period returns vanishes. Thus, we infer that short sellers are not incrementally informed prior to earnings announcements.     

ON THE INFORMATIONAL EFFECT OF SHORT‐SALES CONSTRAINTS: EVIDENCE FROM THE TOKYO STOCK EXCHANGE

Using a database of stock lending fees for Japanese centralized margin transactions, I show that short‐sales constraints reduce the adjustment speed of stock prices to negative information before the announcements of revised earnings forecasts disclosed by firms in the Tokyo Stock Exchange from July 1998 to December 2001. I find that the cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) of the stocks with high short‐sales costs are insensitive to negative information on pre‐announcement days, but the CARs of these stocks become significantly lower than the CARs of the stocks with low short‐sales costs when the announcements reveal negative information to the public.     

Revenue surprises and stock returns

This paper examines the relation between revenue surprises and contemporaneous and future stock returns. It also investigates whether analysts update their earnings forecasts in response to revenue surprises in a timely and unbiased fashion. Stock price reaction on the earnings announcement date is significantly related to contemporaneous as well as past revenue surprises. After controlling for earnings surprises, we find significant abnormal returns in the post-announcement period for stocks that have large revenue surprises. Although analysts revise their forecasts of future earnings in response to revenue surprises, they are slow to incorporate fully the information in revenue surprises.     

Expectations and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns

Previous research has shown that stocks with low prices relative to book value, cash flow, earnings, or dividends (that is, value stocks) earn high returns. Value stocks may earn high returns because they are more risky. Alternatively, systematic errors in expectations may explain the high returns earned by value stocks. I test for the existence of systematic errors using survey data on forecasts by stock market analysts. I show that investment strategies that seek to exploit errors in analysts' forecasts earn superior returns because expectations about future growth in earnings are too extreme.     

Informed trading around earnings and mutual fund alphas

We examine whether informed trading around earnings announcements drives mutual fund performance. The measure is motivated by prior studies arguing that a mutual fund is skilled if it buys stocks with subsequent high earnings announcement returns. We find that this measure predicts future mutual fund returns. On average, after adjusting for Carhart’s four risk factors, the top decile of mutual funds outperforms the bottom decile by 44 basis points per quarter. By decomposing fund alphas into two components in their relations to earnings, we find that this measure is only associated with earnings-related fund alphas. This measure can also be used to predict stock returns at future earnings announcements.     

Earnings Surprises,Growth Expectations,and Stock Returns or Don't Let an Earnings Torpedo Sink Your Portfolio

We provide new evidence that the inferior returns to growth stocks relative to value stocks are the result of expectational errors about future earnings performance. Our evidence demonstrates that growth stocks exhibit an asymmetric response to earnings surprises. We show that while growth stocks are at least as likely to announce negative earnings surprises as positive earnings surprises, they exhibit an asymmetrically large negative price response to negative earnings surprises. After controlling for this asymmetric price response, we find no remaining evidence of a return differential between growth and value stocks. We conclude that the inferior return to growth stocks is attributable to overoptimistic expectational errors that are corrected through subsequent negative earnings surprises.     

The Predictive Ability of Dividend and Earnings Yields for Long-Term Stock Returns

We use empirical models to examine the predictive ability of dividend and earnings yields for long‐term stock returns. Results show that dividend and earnings yields share a similar predictive power for future stock returns and growth. We find that the predictive power of dividend yields increases with the return horizon, but that yields forecast future returns and growth over a much longer horizon. Finally, dividend and earnings yields exhibit high autocorrelation and strong contemporaneous relations.     

Risk,Mispricing, and Value Investing

We evaluate the stock return performance of a modified version of the book-to-market strategy and its implications for market efficiency. If the previously documented superior stock return of the book-to-market strategy represents mispricing, its performance should be improved by excluding fairly valued firms with extreme book-to-market ratios. To attain this, we classify stocks as value or glamour on book-to-market ratios and accounting accruals jointly. This joint classification is likely to exclude stocks with extreme book-to-market ratios due to mismeasured accounting book values reflecting limitations underlying the accounting system. Using both 12-month buy-and-hold returns and earnings announcement returns, our results show that this joint classification generates substantially higher portfolio returns in the post-portfolio-formation year than the book-to-market classification alone with no evidence of increased risk. In addition, this superior stock return performance is more pronounced among firms held primarily by small (unsophisticated) investors and followed less closely by market participants (stock price <$10). Finally, and most importantly, financial analysts are overly optimistic (pessimistic) about earnings of glamour (value) stock, and for a subset of firms identified as overvalued by our strategy, the earnings announcement raw return, as well as abnormal return, is negative. These last results are particularly important because it is hard to envision a model consistent with rational investors holding risky stocks with predictable negative raw returns for a long period of time rather than holding fT-bills and with financial analysts systematically overestimating the earnings of these stocks while underestimating earnings of stocks that outperform the stock market.     

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.     

The Explanatory Power of Canadian Accounting Measures of Earnings Dilution*

This paper examines the properties of the accounting measures of dilution under pre‐2001 Canadian GAAP. Fully diluted earnings per share (EPS) presents investors with a per‐share figure that attempts to capture the maximum potential dilution that would occur if all dilutive convertible securities were converted and all dilutive stock options and rights exercised. We examine how the difference between basic and fully diluted EPS, which we refer to as the dilutive adjustment, affects the ability of EPS to predict one‐period‐ahead EPS. Moreover, we address the issue of the explanatory power of changes in the dilutive adjustment for unexpected stock returns over the year and at the earnings announcement date. Surprisingly, in contrast with the traditional accounting view that increases in the dilutive adjustment present the investor with bad news due to potential dilution of the future earnings stream, the dilutive adjustment is positively related to next period's earnings and increases in the dilutive adjustment are positively correlated with contemporaneous long‐window stock returns. These results can be attributed to the relation between the dilutive adjustment and the earnings process combined with a partial resolution of the uncertainty attached to growth firms. We find no evidence that investors use information from the disclosure of fully diluted EPS at the earnings announcement date. These results are consistent with increases in the dilutive adjustment capturing the partial realization of a firm's growth potential that more than outweighs the potential dilution attached to the convertible securities; however, this information appears to be already embedded in price prior to the disclosure of fully diluted EPS.     

Private Placement of Common Equity and Earnings Expectations

We examine earnings forecast revisions by analysts subsequent to the announcement of private equity placements. Results show that analysts make significant upward revisions to their forecasts for current-year earnings. Furthermore, these forecast revisions are significantly related to announcement-period abnormal returns, but not to the risk changes accompanying the equity placement. These findings are consistent with the information hypothesis, which suggests that private equity placements convey favorable information about future earnings.