Characteristics of Earnings-Leading Versus Price-Leading Firms

This study attempts to identify firm characteristics that explain the disparity between the information content of accounting earnings and stock prices. Granger's causality concept was employed to classify sample firms into four groups: price-leading firms, feedback-system firms, earnings-leading firms, and no-causation firms. The feedback-system firms were either combined with the no-causation firms or eliminated entirely to form three sample groups. The entire sample firms then were divided into two classes. The first is for estimation, and the second is for prediction. Results indicate that firm size, capital structure, R-square of regressing prices at time t against earnings at time t – 1, R-square of regressing earnings at time t against prices at time t – 1, and percentage of shares held by institutions are the significant explaining variables. The application of the coefficient estimates to the hold-out sample indicates that 76.2% of the firms can be correctly classified into the corresponding groups. These results were consistent with those from canonical discrimination and other multivariate statistical methods.