The Relation between Returns and Earnings: Evidence for the UK

This paper presents an empirical study of the explanatory power of annual earnings figures for annual stock returns using UK data. The analysis is performed on a sample of companies, with varying year-ends, over the period 1969–1990. The research exploits Ohlson's recent theoretical contributions to the study of the valuation relevance of accounting information, and it complements a study by Easton and Harris (1991) on US data. Similar to the results of Easton and Harris, the results for the UK provide consistent evidence that both earnings levels and earnings differences have significant explanatory power for security returns. However, unlike Easton and Harris, the evidence from individual year regressions suggests that changes in earnings rather than the level of earnings may be more important in explaining security returns in the UK.