Market Underreaction Research Articles

Liquidity changes and decomposition in the Japanese equity market

In this study, we investigate the relationship between liquidity changes and stock returns in the Japanese stock market. The results confirm that stocks with increased liquidity have higher stock returns than those with decreased liquidity. This phenomenon indicates that the market under-reacts to changes in liquidity. We also decompose liquidity and analyze how each component is priced. We confirm that stock-specific long-term liquidity changes relate negatively to stock returns in the following month, while stock-specific short-term liquidity changes relate positively to stock returns in the following month. The sensitivity of changes in the liquidity of individual stocks to changes in market liquidity was found not to be priced.

Risk Factor Disclosures: Do Managers and Markets Speak the Same Language?

SYNOPSIS Prior research documents market responses to quarterly updates to annual risk factor disclosures, suggesting quarterly risk factor updates are informative. In this study, we explore whether future equity returns are associated with quarterly risk factor updates and whether updates containing more focused and specific language affect this relationship. We find that firms with quarterly risk factor updates experience lower future abnormal returns, relative to firms without updates, suggesting that, on average, the market reaction to quarterly risk factor updates is incomplete at the time the 10-Q is filed. This incomplete market reaction is driven primarily by the group of updates that is important yet is less specific about the effects of the risk on firm fundamentals. We also find that analysts underreact to the same group of risk factor updates associated with the market underreaction. JEL Classifications: D8; G14; M41; M48.

Bayesian Investor Belief Updating Speed and Market Underreaction to Earnings Announcements

AbstractBuilding on the Bayesian Theorem, we propose a multi‐period market microstructure model to understand how Bayesian investors underact new information and the duration of market underreaction. Applying the model to post‐earnings‐announcement drifts, our simulation and regression analyses show that the duration of the post‐announcement price adjustment process and the post‐announcement drifts can be explained by the new measure of belief updating speed that quantifies the uncertainties faced by Bayesian investors when incorporating new information into prices. Our study highlights the importance of incorporating the belief uncertainties of uninformed investors in explaining market underreaction in the Bayesian framework.

Pension funding and the cross section of stock returns - The case of Germany

We re-examine the relation between the funding of corporate pension plans and a cross-section of stock returns. In Germany, we observe an increasing funding of historically unfunded pension plans. Firms may freely choose to underfund or not even fund pension plans at all. We find that lower funding levels are related to higher unexpected future earnings and higher stock returns. In Germany, firms with lower pension funding levels perform better than expected by the capital market in contrast to the United States and the United Kingdom. The capital market's underreaction to the earnings announcements of firms with highly underfunded pension plans compared to firms with well-funded plans is higher for short- and long-time horizons. The underreaction is substantially lower for firms with more investor attention and less pension plan and firm opacity.

The timing of information arrival and overnight returns

This paper examines the information assimilation of overnight returns after positive or negative news arriving during RHT (regular-hours-trading) or AHT (after-hour-trading). We first show that overnight returns are informative of earnings news arriving either during RHT or AHT, and the effects are strongest on the first day after the announcement. Our results then suggest that positive (negative) overnight returns after good (bad) earnings news arrival increase (decrease) CARs, with more pronounced effects for news released AHT. We further show that the market takes the timing of news release into account and reacts negatively to those released during AHT, causing significant under-performance in the subsequent CAR. Lastly, our finding of market underreaction to good news and overreaction to bad news when it is released during AHT suggest that it may be more appropriate for managers to release all news during RHT when market participants are at their trading desks.

Does the market reward meeting or beating analyst earnings forecasts? Empirical evidence from China

PurposeUsing a sample of 9,898 firm-year observations from 1,821 unique Chinese listed firms over the period from 2004 to 2019, this study aims to investigate whether the market rewards meeting or beating analyst earnings expectations (MBE).Design/methodology/approachThe authors use an event study methodology to capture market reactions to MBE.FindingsThe authors document a stock return premium for beating analyst forecasts by a wide margin. However, there is no stock return premium for firms that meet or just beat analyst forecasts, suggesting that the market is skeptical of earnings management by these firms. This market underreaction is more pronounced for firms with weak external monitoring. Further analysis shows that meeting or just beating analyst forecasts is indicative of superior future financial performance. The authors do not find firms using earnings management to meet or just beat analyst forecasts.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors provide evidence of market underreaction to meeting or just beating analyst forecasts, with the market's over-skepticism of earnings management being a plausible mechanism for this phenomenon.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study are informative to researchers, market participants and regulators concerned about the impact of analysts and earnings management and interested in detecting and constraining managers' earnings management.Originality/valueThe authors provide new insights into how the market reacts to MBE by showing that the market appears to focus on using meeting or just beating analyst forecasts as an indicator of earnings management, while it does not detect managed MBE. Meeting or just beating analyst forecasts is commonly used as a proxy for earnings management in the literature. However, the findings suggest that it is a noisy proxy for earnings management.

Implied Volatility Changes and Corporate Bond Returns

Corporate bonds with large increases in implied volatility over the past month underperform those with large decreases in implied volatility by 0.6% per month. In contrast to existing studies that show implied volatility changes carry information about fundamental news, our evidence suggests that implied volatility changes contain information about uncertainty shocks to the firm. Our results are consistent with the notion that informed traders with new information about firm risk prefer to trade in the option market and the corporate bond market underreacts to this information. This paper was accepted by Haoxiang Zhu, finance. Funding: We thank the Canadian Derivatives Institute for financial support. J. Cao and X. Zhan acknowledge generous financial support of the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China [Grants GRF 14501720, 14500919]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4379 .

What Drives Stock Market Underreaction to Liquidity Shocks? Evidence from Korea*

AbstractStock‐level liquidity shocks have a positive cross‐sectional relation to not only contemporaneous returns but also one‐month‐ahead returns in the Korean stock market, which implies that the stock market underreacts to liquidity shocks. However, the return continuation after the arrival of liquidity shocks is short‐lived and disappears in two months in Korea, unlike in the United States. The positive relation between liquidity shocks and one‐month‐ahead returns is most pronounced for illiquid stocks but not present for liquid stocks, independently of the level of investor attention. However, the effect of limited attention on the positive relation differs somewhat across alternative attention proxies and becomes insignificant after controlling for liquidity. This evidence suggests that the short‐lived underreaction to liquidity shocks in the Korean stock market is primarily driven not by inattention but by illiquidity.

The Dynamic Effects of Anchoring on Portfolio Return Volatility; Are there any economic issues in the developing world?

This study aims to see the anchoring effect on portfolio return volatility in the case of KSE-30. Business anomalies such as overreaction and under-reaction are affected by a variety of psychological causes. The use of anchors or baseline values known as the anchoring effect causes market under-reaction and overreaction. This research used nearness to 52-week high and nearness to historical high as proxies for under and over-reaction, respectively, to analyze the psychological causes for under and over-reaction. On the KSE-30, the findings revealed that proximity to the 52-week peak positively predicts future returns, whereas proximity to the historical high negatively predicts future returns. KSE-30 was used for rigorous testing. Similarly, the three macroeconomic variables used as control variables are the exchange rate, inflation rate, and interest rate to provide a more robust model of strong prediction capacity. The findings revealed that proximity to the 52-week maximum and proximity to the historical high and other macroeconomic factors had a forecast capacity of around 62 percent. Similarly, focused on volatility clusters, the GARCH (1, 1) model was used to measure the association between potential and past returns. The results show that there is a first order autoregressive function in the GARCH (1, 1) model. The findings also show that their predictive capacity decreases when the study's individual variables are moved from every day to annual Periods.

Exploiting the persistence in managerial market timing

Some firms time their share issuances/repurchases using their private information while others do not. We identify successful timers by comparing a cash-flow-based measure of net share issuance (NSI) with a share-based measure. Recent successful timers—only a small fraction (23%)—drive the known return predictability of NSI in the following year. The evidence suggests that the stock market underreacts to the persistence of managerial market-timing, providing significant opportunities for investors to mimic successful market-timing in their investment strategies. A value-weighted NSI hedge portfolio formed only on recent successful timers earns a six-factor alpha of 11.8% a year after transaction costs.

Pervasive underreaction: Evidence from high-frequency data

We propose a novel high-frequency decomposition of daily stock returns into news- and non-news-driven components, and uncover evidence of pervasive stock market underreaction to firm news. Prices tend to drift in the same direction as the initial market response for several days after the news arrival without reversals. A trading strategy exploiting the return drift generates high abnormal returns and remains profitable after transaction costs. To understand the economic mechanism, we find that the return drift is stronger when investors are distracted. Analysts’ slow adjustments of market expectations following firm news also contribute to the market underreaction.

Discussion of “disclosure processing costs, investors' information choice, and equity market outcomes: A review”

In their review of investor processing costs, Blankespoor, deHaan, and Marinovic (2020) encourage researchers to consider “rational inattention” as a way to explain stock market underreaction to public information. We formalize their argument and propose alternatives using a set of formal models. To distinguish between the various drivers of underreaction, we encourage future researchers to consider the opportunity cost of being inattentive, the historical evolution of underreaction, and the difference between information-based and return-based underreaction.

A New Metric of Market Underreaction to Earnings Announcements: An Empirical Test*

AbstractThis paper provides empirical evidence that the squared correlation coefficient between order imbalance and earnings surprise (COE) measures market underreaction and predicts the post‐earnings announcement drift. We find strong evidence that COE during the announcement period predicts price movements (returns) during the post‐announcement period in the expected direction. We find qualitatively similar results using risk‐adjusted returns (i.e., Fama‐French, Carhart, and Pastor‐Stambaugh factor alphas), suggesting that well‐known risk factors do not explain the profitability of trading strategy based on COE.

Adaptive market hypothesis and investor sentiments: global evidence

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate the adaptive market hypothesis (AMH) for 21 major global market indices for the period 1998–2018. These market indices cover the 16 largest global financial markets.Design/methodology/approachQuantile-regression methodology is employed to examine the market efficiency of a large number of financial markets from America, Europe and the Asia–Pacific region.FindingsThe results show that the returns in higher quantiles are negatively autocorrelated, and those in lower quantiles are positively autocorrelated. This evidence is stronger for the tails of return distribution. The positive autocorrelation (momentum effect) suggests market underreaction, and the negative autocorrelation (reversal effect) suggests overreaction. Overall, market efficiency appears to be time-varying and conditioned to the state of the market.Originality/valueThis study offers considerable evidence in favor of the AMH, for a large number of financial markets. These markets are substantially different from each other in terms of geography, nature of operation and size of the economy. The results from this study would be helpful to the academics, regulators and practitioners interested in financial markets.

Statutory corporate tax change and the stock market returns: the global experience

ABSTRACT This study offers a global perspective on the relationship between statutory corporate tax changes and country equity index returns for 54 countries for 2002–2017. Using fixed-effect models for country-effect to account for possible omitted country characteristics, we report higher world-adjusted buy and hold abnormal returns (BHARs) for the country-years with higher corporate tax cuts. Noticeably, we document this outcome for not only the year before the actual tax change but also the year afterwards, indicating that investors might not fully or quickly integrate tax change information. The results hold after excluding the 2008 global financial crisis. Dividing the sample based on market development, we report similar results for emerging and frontier markets, but the tax cut effect becomes insignificant for the one-year window after the tax change in developed markets, indicating a lesser degree of market underreaction.

Sins of the Father: The Effect of a Parent Firm's Accounting Misconduct on Current and Former Subsidiaries

We exploit a unique setting to examine how managerial and economic connections affect the current and former subsidiaries (“subsidiaries”) of a parent firm undergoing a restatement and bankruptcy. The demise of Enron and the varying nature of ties between Enron and its four publicly traded subsidiaries allow us to examine if capital market reactions for each of the subsidiaries surrounding Enron’s failure vary with the nature of their connections to Enron. We observe no significant differences in contemporaneous market reaction regardless of the nature and strength of connections between Enron and the subsidiaries, providing two main insights. First, over the year following the Enron events, those subsidiaries with ownership or accounting ties but with weak economic ties performed in-line with the industry, consistent with the lack of a differential market reaction across these sets of firms. This result contrasts with recent studies finding evidence of manager fixed effects affecting accounting choices. Second, we find that Enron’s most economically connected subsidiary (predictably) went bankrupt shortly after Enron, suggesting a market under-reaction at the time of the Enron events. Additional analysis provides some limited evidence that low institutional ownership or slow analyst forecast updating partly explains this under-reaction. Our study adds to the literature on restatements, management reputation effects, peer information transfer, and the market’s ability to react to specific fundamental information.

Surprise in Short Interest

We extract the news component of short-selling activity by accounting for important cross-sectional, distributional differences in short interest. The resulting measure of surprise in short interest negatively predicts the cross section of both U.S. and international equity returns. Our results also indicate that this predictability originates from short sellers' informed trading on mispricing and the market's underreaction to the news component of short-sale reports. Consistent with the notion of costly arbitrage, the return predictability is stronger among illiquid, volatile stocks and stocks with high information uncertainty, but importantly, unrelated short-selling frictions.

Net Share Issuance and Asset Growth Effects: The Role of Managerial Incentives

By considering executives’ stock holdings (incentives) alongside their decisions over equity buybacks/issuance and asset growth, investors can discern companies likely to outperform. In the presence of asymmetric information, managerial equity incentives mitigate company managers’ empire-building motives while increasing their market-timing motives. If the market underreacts to these motives, the negative return predictability by net share issuance (NSI) and asset growth (AG) should be more pronounced among stocks with, respectively, larger managerial equity incentives and smaller managerial equity incentives. Our evidence supports this prediction. A hybrid strategy that exploited the NSI and AG effects in different groups of stocks screened by managerial equity incentives attained significant alphas after transaction costs, even after we controlled for the investment and profitability factors known to attenuate the two effects. Disclosure: The authors report no conflicts of interest. Editor’s Notes Submitted 4 June 2019 Accepted 17 September 2019 by Stephen J. Brown.

Media heterogeneity and post‐earnings announcement drift: evidence from China

AbstractThis paper examines how the Chinese stock market acts differently towards state‐controlled and market‐oriented media coverage. Using a setting of post‐earnings announcement drift, we find that information from state‐controlled media enters the stock price in a timelier manner, while the message from market‐oriented media needs more time to get a response from investors. The effect is also influenced by whether the type of news coverage is good or bad. Our findings suggest that the capital market underreacts when good news is reported by the market‐oriented media.

An analytical measure of market underreaction to earnings news

Prior studies have provided a number of possible explanations for delayed market reactions to earnings announcements. However, there has been relatively little effort to predict the magnitude of the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD). We show that the squared correlation coefficient (ρ2) between order imbalance and earnings surprise determines the magnitude of market underreaction to earnings surprises and PEAD=k⋅ρ2, where k is the information content of earnings. We discuss several testable implications of our analytical results, including a model-implied measure of information asymmetry that arises from the differential information processing ability of traders.