Unintended Effects of Preannouncements on Investor Reactions to Earnings News*

This study uses an experiment to examine three alternative theoretical explanations for the unintended effects of preannouncements on investor reactions to earnings news. The theoretical explanations are cue consistency, recency effects, and diminishing marginal reactions. The experiment varies the amount of a management preannouncement at five different levels while holding constant consensus analyst expectations prior to the preannouncement and the subsequent earnings announcement. Participants provide preliminary forecasts of current‐ and next‐period earnings per share (EPS) prior to the preannouncement, after the preannouncement, and after the earnings announcement. The pattern of participants' final next‐year EPS forecasts and the results of follow‐up analyses appear most consistent with the predictions of diminishing marginal reactions and, to a somewhat lesser extent, cue consistency, suggesting that both mechanisms play a role in determining the effects of preannouncements. There is little evidence supporting recency effects. Finally, supplemental evidence indicates that participants are unaware that preannouncements influence their reactions to earnings news, suggesting that the effects are unintended. This study has implications for managers who make preannouncement disclosure decisions and for academics who wish to understand and interpret prior research on earnings preannouncements.     

国外投资者关系管理价值效应研究前沿述评

投资者关系管理是一种有价值的管理活动,国外丰富的研究成果值得借鉴和学习.IRM的价值路径主要有两条:一是直接价值效应.主要体现IRM在改善和提高企业声誉、增加公司可见度、吸引机构投资者等方面具有直接的贡献;二是间接价值效应.主要体现在长期有效的IRM能够发挥降低资本成本、提高股价以及最终提升公司价值等作用.通过梳理国外有关IRM价值相关性研究成果,把握IRM研究前沿,为我国相关理论研究和企业实践提供经验借鉴.     

The Effect of Investor Status on Investors' Susceptibility to Earnings Fixation

This study investigates whether an individual's status as a current or a prospective investor affects the investor's susceptibility to earnings fixation and proposes a mechanism to reduce earnings fixation. Our experimental results suggest that current investors are more susceptible to earnings fixation than prospective investors, and that current investors can reduce earnings fixation by explicitly forecasting future earnings as part of their evaluation process. We provide theory‐consistent evidence that current investors' prevention focus makes them elevate the importance of summary earnings in their evaluation of a company. However, after forecasting future earnings, current investors view summary earnings as only one of several similarly important evaluation inputs rather than as one substantially more important input (relative to its components). Our study contributes to research on earnings fixation and investor status. We also contribute to practice by documenting the moderating effect of investor status on earnings fixation and by identifying a simple mechanism that current investors can use to reduce their susceptibility to earnings fixation.     

Spillover Effects of Fraud Allegations and Investor Sentiment

We examine whether a stock price spillover effect spreads through the method of listing or country of origin and whether this spillover effect changes when investor sentiment shifts. Using a sample of fraud allegations against Chinese companies that became public through Chinese reverse mergers (CRMs), we investigate whether firms that experienced negative spillover effects on their stock prices are those from the same country and/or with the same method of listing as the firms accused of fraud. We first show that the negative spillover effect channeled through the firm's country of origin becomes stronger when investor sentiment about Chinese companies becomes pessimistic, as evinced by significant declines in the stock prices of non-fraudulent Chinese companies, including both CRMs and Chinese IPOs. Second, we show that the negative spillover effects on CRMs are stronger than those on Chinese IPOs and non-Chinese reverse mergers, suggesting that both country and listing method are applicable to CRMs. Our findings indicate that (i) investor sentiment plays an important role in the spillover process involving fraud allegations and (ii) while the two channels could coexist, negative spillover effects that spread through the country of origin play a more prominent role than those that spread through the method of listing.     

Resource Allocation Effects of Price Reactions to Disclosures*

Capital market participants collectively may possess information about the valuation implications of a firm's change in strategy not known by the management of the firm proposing the change. We ask whether a firm's management can exploit the capital market's information in deciding either whether to proceed with a contemplated strategy change or whether to continue with a previously initiated strategy change. In the case of a proposed strategy change, we show that managers can extract the capital market's information by announcing a potential new strategy, and then conditioning the decision to implement the new strategy on the size of the market's price reaction to the announcement. Under this arrangement, we show that a necessary condition to implement all and only positive net present value strategy changes is that managers proceed to implement some strategies that garner negative price reactions upon their announcement. In the case of deciding whether to continue with a previously implemented strategy change, we show that it may be optimal for the firm to predicate its abandonment/continuation decision on the magnitude of the costs it has already incurred. Thus, what looks like “sunk‐cost” behavior may in fact be optimal. Both demonstrations show that, in addition to performing their usual role of anticipating future cash flows generated by a manager's actions, capital market prices can also be used to direct a manager's actions. It follows that, in contrast to the usual depiction of the information flows between capital markets and firms as being one way — from firms to the capital markets — information also flows from capital markets to firms.     

The Effects of Alcohol Use on Economic Decision Making

In a controlled laboratory experiment, we study the causal effect of alcohol on economic decision making. A treatment group was given a dose of alcohol designed to target a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.08 while the BAC of those in the control group remained 0.00. We investigate the behavior of control and treatment groups in the following types of tasks: math, uncertainty, overconfidence, strategic games, food choice, anchoring, and altruism. Our results indicate that alcohol consumption has little systematic effect on economic behavior, at least for the BAC level considered. Further, there is little evidence that alcohol differentially impacts the choices of male and female subjects.     

How Disclosure Features of Corporate Social Responsibility Reports Interact with Investor Numeracy to Influence Investor Judgments

Firms’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports typically frame their strategies in terms of either community or global efforts (i.e., “strategy frame”). Further, the style used to depict CSR performance in reports often highlights either pictures or words (i.e., “presentation style”). These two prominent disclosure features of CSR reports promote a natural fit or misfit in the focus (relatively low‐level or high‐level focus) investors adopt when thinking about the firm and its CSR efforts. Further, these disclosure features likely have different effects on investors depending on their numeracy or, in other words, the way that they naturally process numerical information. In this study, we predict and find that a fit between the strategy frame and the presentation style of a firm's CSR report causes less numerate investors to be more willing to invest than when a fit is not present. Specifically, we find that a fit leads less numerate investors to experience subjective feelings of processing fluency and, in turn, positive affect that serves as a cue that the positive CSR performance information can be relied upon, which positively influences willingness to invest. Our results have implications for both CSR reports as well as other types of firm disclosures that increasingly vary along similar disclosure characteristics. Our results also contribute to both the growing literature on presentation effects in accounting, as well as the broader business literature on CSR reporting.     

The Effect of Humanizing Robo‐Advisors on Investor Judgments*

We examine the effect of humanizing (naming) robo‐advisors on investor judgments, which has taken on increased importance as robo‐advisors have become increasingly common and there is currently little SEC regulation governing key aspects of their use. In our first experiment, we predict and find that investors are more likely to rely on the investment recommendation of an unnamed robo‐advisor, whereas they are more likely to rely on the investment recommendation of a named human advisor. Theory suggests one reason that naming a robo‐advisor may have drawbacks pertains to the complexity of the task the robo‐advisor performs. We explore the importance of task complexity in our second experiment. We predict and find that investors are less likely to rely on a named robo‐advisor when the advisor is perceived to be performing a relatively complex task, consistent with our first experiment, and more likely to rely on a named robo‐advisor when the advisor is perceived to be performing a relatively simple task, consistent with prior research on human‐computer interactions. Our findings contribute to the literature examining how technology influences the acquisition and use of financial information and the general literature on human‐computer interactions. Our study also addresses a call by the SEC to learn more about robo‐advisors. Lastly, our study has practical implications for wealth management firms by demonstrating the potentially negative effects of making robo‐advisors more humanlike in an attempt to engage and attract users.     

The Effect of Short Selling on Market Reactions to Earnings Announcements*

This paper examines the effect of the inherent demand implied by short interest by studying how stock price reactions to earnings announcements depend on the level of short interest. We find that, for extreme good and bad news events, the inherent demand increases stock prices around the earnings announcement date, with the effect being stronger for good news relative to bad news. Specifically, the initial market reaction to an extreme positive earnings surprise is larger for firms with high levels of short interest. On the other hand, for an extreme negative earnings surprise event, the initial market reaction is less negative for heavily shorted firms. Furthermore, we find that the post‐earnings‐announcement drift is smaller (larger) in magnitude for extreme positive (negative) earnings surprises for the heavily shorted firms.     

创意产业链的动态衍生模式探析

创意产业已经成为全球经济发展新引擎。本文首先从创意的出路在于产品化、产业化出发,提出了建立完整高效的产业链条的必要,其次,从理论上探究了创意产业链的衍生模式,进而分析和考察了创意产业链的四种衍生路径;最后,对创意产业的后续研究进行了瞻望。     

浅谈投资者情绪对中国资本市场的影响

本文主要从分析投资者情绪的变化和影响投资者情绪的因素来分析中国资本市场的变化,并且从中找到资本市场变化与投资者情绪之间的联系,与此同时,通过研究投资者情绪理论可以创造一个新的金融管理观念。尤其是在我国金融市场中,投资者情绪已经逐渐成为研究资本市场的重要指标,所以本文将对国内外研究投资者情绪的理论进行整合并结合当前中国资本市场给出未来发展方向,希望以后可以运用投资者情绪指标来研究和评估现实生活中的问题。     

中部地区引进区域性战略投资者的的SWOT分析

区域性战略投资者,作为本课题组新提出的概念,具有不同于一般性招商投资的显著特点,其对于区域经济发展具有重要意义。对于面临产业升级、资金瓶颈和技术与创新压力的中部地区尤其如此。而伴随区域经济发展格局日益激烈的竞争,中部地区在吸引区域性战略投资者方面具有哪些优势、存在哪些劣势,面临哪些机遇,又存在哪些挑战,是亟需认真探讨的。基于此,对其展开深入的SWOT分析,尤为重要。     

投资者情绪与股市的互动研究

目前还很少有人对投资者情绪与股市之间的互动进行研究。本文发现用好淡指数表示的情绪指标能反映股市的牛熊状况,然后利用脉冲响应函数、方差分解和格兰杰因果检验分析了股市收益率、投资者中期情绪指数和短期情绪指数三者之间的动态关系。分析表明,投资者中期情绪指数对股市的收益率波动的影响要远强于投资者短期情绪指数的影响,而且中期情绪指数是股市收益率的格兰杰原因;投资者中期情绪指数基本上不受股市收益率与短期指数的影响;投资者短期情绪指数明显受到市场收益率波动的冲击,市场收益率是短期情绪指数的格兰杰原因,而中期情绪指数对短期情绪影响很小。     

An Empirical Analysis of the Effects of Online Trading on Stock Price and Trading Volume Reactions to Earnings Announcements*

This study provides evidence regarding the effects of online trading on stock price and trading volume reactions to quarterly earnings announcements. We test for differences in stock price and volume reactions to quarterly earnings announcements between a period with a significant amount of online trading (1996‐99) and a period without online trading (1992‐95). We conjecture that online trading has increased the proportion of naive investors in the market. We predict that this will result in (1) a decrease in the average precision of investor information prior to earnings announcements leading to higher earnings response coefficients (ERCs), (2) an increase in differential interpretation of earnings leading to higher trading volume reactions that are unrelated to price change, and (3) a decrease in differential prior precision leading to a decrease in the association between trading volume and absolute price change. We find evidence consistent with all three predictions. Our findings are relevant for assessing the validity of concerns about online trading expressed by regulators and the validity of theoretical models of trade with asymmetrically informed investors.     

利用农作物秸秆生产草酸

我国是农业大国,农作物秸秆资源丰富,随着人们生活水平的提高,清洁能源的推广及家畜养殖量的减少,秸秆在农村多被弃置,很多时候被付之一炬,不仅浪费资源还严重污染大气环境。研究利用秸秆生产草酸,旨在为秸秆综合利用寻找出路,走循环经济道路。     

市场情绪形成机理及其对投资者行为的影响

市场情绪影响着投资者的行为,时市场情绪形成机理的研究将有助于对投资者行为的认识,具有重要的理论和现实意义。文章以行为金融学和心理学理论为基础,分析了市场情绪的形成机理及其对投资行为的影响,并由此得出关于证券投资和证券市场调控的重要启示。