Earnings News Research Articles

Aggregate market attention around earnings announcements

PurposeThis analysis is the first to explore the overall roles of the offsetting attraction and distraction influences of earnings news in shaping the level of attention given to the equity market by market participants.Design/methodology/approachWe use multivariate regression approach and examine how trading activity levels within the set of non-announcing firms varies with respect to collective measures of contemporaneous earnings announcement visibility. We employ attention and information transfer theories in our hypothesis development.FindingsThis analysis is the first to explore the overall roles of the offsetting attraction and distraction influences of earnings news in shaping the level of attention given to the equity market by market participants. Specifically, we examine how the number of earnings announcement activity affects investor attention as measured by trading volume given to the set of non-announcing firms. We find that while earnings announcement numbers lower trading volume responses to earnings news among announcing firms (consistent with Hirshleifer et al., 2009), their distractive influence does not carry over into the market as a whole. More importantly, investor attention to both the overall market and the larger subset of non-announcing firms increase in response to earnings news activity levels. However, after decomposing the announcers as same-industry and different-industry announcers, we find that investor attention to the non-announcing segment of the market increases with the number of same-industry announcers, but actually seems to decrease (i.e. they distract attention) with the number of different-industry announcers. We also find that the associated earnings surprise brings attention to non-announcing firms (consistent with earnings news is relevant to overall market price movements). Finally, we find that distraction effects are attenuated in the financial crisis period.Research limitations/implicationsA promising area of future research is to examine the relation between market pricing efficiency and aggregate earnings activity for the set of non-announcing firms. Although it will be a challenging task to measure pricing efficiency for the non-announcers, this will complement the prior literature only focusing on the announcing segment of the market.Practical implicationsFirst, instead of assessing the impact of number of earnings announcements on the subset of announcing firms, which is a micro-level perspective, we identify the impact of news arrivals on all firms in the market including the vastly larger set of non-announcing firms. Second, by decomposing the number of announcements into industry-related and -unrelated news we show that different types of news arrivals spark investor attention differently, suggesting the importance of categorizing the news into related and unrelated industries.Social implicationsA potential future area of research identified by our analysis is to investigate what type of investors' attention is distracted or attracted during the earnings announcements. A promising area of future research is to examine the relation between market pricing efficiency and aggregate earnings activity for the set of non-announcing firms.Originality/valueThis paper is the first one exploring the overall roles of the offsetting attraction and distraction influences of earnings announcements in shaping the level of investor attention given to the equity market by market participants. Our findings should be of interest to investors, analysts, security market regulators and researchers.

Moving Forward: Management Guidance and Earnings Announcement Returns

We provide new evidence on the role of management guidance in explaining earnings announcement-period returns. We show that guidance practices changed around the financial crisis in ways likely to affect the information content of guidance bundled with earnings. Managers provide guidance for a number of metrics and have moved towards annual and away from quarterly guidance, perhaps because of concerns about the managerial “myopia” some associate with quarterly EPS guidance. EPS and/or sales guidance news is incrementally informative and explains returns to about the same extent as earnings news, more so when earnings disappoint or firms report large beats. Specifications that capture the sign and consistency of signals are about as informative as those that use magnitudes. Similar to previous evidence, the response is asymmetric, with a stronger response to adverse earnings news accompanied by downgrades.

Informed short selling: evidence from economically linked firms

PurposeThis paper examines how sophisticated and better-informed investors, such as short sellers, trade on information along the supply chain. Given the economic linkages between suppliers and customers, one would expect short sellers to trade on such information and to capitalize on investors' inattention to such economic links.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses both multivariate regression analysis and portfolio analysis where the time series averages of equally weighted monthly portfolio returns are reported to explore the abnormal returns of long-short trading strategies.FindingsResults indicate that short interest predicts unexpected earnings news, consistent with short sellers extracting information from economic relationships. There is a strong negative relationship between short interest in the supplier firm and the one-month future stock return of the customer firm. This negative relation significantly persists for at least 12 months. One plausible channel explaining the information content of supplier (customer) firm's short interest for the customer (supplier) firms is the short sale constraints on the customer (supplier) firms.Originality/valueThe paper addresses a gap in the literature by examining whether short selling in a firm in the months leading up to a customer's (supplier's) negative shock is negatively correlated to the customer's (supplier's) future performance. Overall, the findings suggest that short sellers play an important role in the price discovery of related firms in the supply chain, which is beyond the direct effects documented in prior literature.

Do record earnings affect market reactions to earnings news?

We find evidence that a firm’s record earnings influence market response to earnings news. Our results show that the proximity of the firm’s earnings to its record earnings leads to investors’ underreaction following earnings announcements, exacerbating post-earnings-announcement drift. Such biased behavior is more pronounced in low-growth firms and firms with low institutional ownership. Meanwhile, analysts are not subject to this anchoring bias when a firm’s earnings are close to its record earnings. Overall, we find that a firm’s record earnings play an important role as an anchor when market participants evaluate the firm’s earnings news.

When Can Quarterly Reports Resolve Uncertainty About Earnings? Evidence From ASC 606

We examine whether concurrent quarterly reports help investors respond to earnings news when uncertainty is high. Although existing studies suggest that quarterly reports released concurrently with earnings depress trading due to information overload, we predict that concurrent reports help investors trade when they face uncertainty about how to interpret earnings news. We rely on the implementation of ASC 606 as a quasi-exogenous increase in uncertainty about how to respond to earnings news. Specifically, we find that when uncertainty is high in the first quarter of ASC 606 implementation, 10-Qs released concurrently with earnings are associated with increased trading in response to earnings news. We find the relation is stronger when firms face greater uncertainty and when firms include more discussion of revenue recognition. Our results suggest that concurrent quarterly reports are informative to investors when uncertainty is especially high.

Relationship between investor sentiment and earnings news in high‐ and low‐sentiment periods

AbstractUsing the Chinese equity market as the testing venue, this study explores how investor sentiment affects the immediate reaction of stock prices to earnings news in high‐ and low‐sentiment periods. Our key finding is that the sentiment‐driven pricing of earnings will differ between the two periods. Specifically, during high‐sentiment (low‐sentiment) periods, the stock price sensitivity to good (bad) earnings news increases (decreases) with investor sentiment, whereas the stock price sensitivity to bad (good) earnings news is unrelated to investor sentiment. Additionally, we find that the effect of sentiment is more pronounced for young, high volatility, growth and distressed stocks. However, contrary to the U.S. evidence, our results show that small stocks are not always more exposed to sentiment. Further analysis of the role of short‐sales constraints in the sensitivity of stock prices to bad earnings news implies that short sales can enhance informational efficiency.

Short‐selling costs and asymmetric price response to economic shocks: A transaction cost explanation to price overshooting

AbstractWe propose a model that combines performance‐based arbitrage, short‐sale constraints, and costly arbitrage. In the model, good earnings surprises trigger short‐covering causing price overshooting for highly shorted stocks. However, price overshooting is on average lower than short‐selling costs. Model predictions are empirically tested using Brazilian short‐selling data. We find empirical support for the short‐covering and overshooting phenomena. Furthermore, there is evidence that the intensity of overshooting is lower than the short‐selling borrowing fee, for both U.S. and Brazilian markets. Theoretical and empirical results suggest that arbitrageurs behave asymmetrically to good and bad earnings news.

Characteristics and Implications of Long-Term Earnings Guidance

ABSTRACTWe examine a form of voluntary disclosure that has received limited attention to date, namely, managers' long-term guidance for earnings three to five years in advance. We identify 1,739 long-term earnings forecasts issued by 295 unique firms from 2000 to 2012 and find that relative to firms that issue only short-term earnings guidance, those that also issue long-term guidance are larger, have more certain operating environments, and are followed by analysts who are more likely to issue long-term growth forecasts. Long-term guidance is informative to investors and analysts incorporate the news contained in these forecasts into their own long-term growth forecasts. We also document that the issuance of long-term guidance is associated with more (less) investor focus on long-term (short-term) earnings news. Last, we find mixed evidence on the association between long-term guidance and real earnings management decisions. Our study adds to the literature on managers' voluntary disclosure choices.Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.JEL Classifications: G17; M41.

Predictability of Analyst Earnings Forecast Errors and Institutional and Individual Investors’ Reactions to Earnings News

We decompose analysts’ earnings forecast error into predictable and unpredictable components and investigate individual vis-à-vis institutional investors’ reactions to each of these components. We find that in the immediate post-earnings announcement window, only individuals under-react to the predictable component, while both individuals and institutions under-react to the unpredictable component. The price drift in this window is driven primarily by investors’ under-reaction to the unpredictable component. This drift remains highly significant in larger firms and intensifies in firms with complex financial reports, suggesting that it likely represents the slow and noisy process of price discovery. Around the next quarterly earnings announcement, only individuals under-react to the previous quarter’s predictable component, and this fixation drives the entire price drift in this window. This drift disappears in larger firms and gets exacerbated in firms with greater forecast error autocorrelations, suggesting that it is likely attributable to incomplete processing of earnings information by individuals.

High-frequency traders and price informativeness during earnings announcements

High frequency traders (HFTs) account for a significant fraction of the total market volume. Prompted by concerns that HFTs reap unfair advantages over other traders by using super-fast trading technologies, some regulatory proposals aim to curb HFTs’ ultra-low-latency activities. However, research suggests that HFTs also play beneficial roles in financial markets, including liquidity provision as voluntary market makers. Currently, little is known about their role in incorporating firm-specific fundamental information into prices. Employing a novel dataset that identifies trades by HFTs and non-HFTs, we find that earnings response coefficients are larger and abnormal price impact of trades are lower when HFTs trade more following earnings announcements, suggesting that HFTs facilitate efficient assimilation of earnings news. HFTs also enhance the forecasting capabilities of financial analysts. Furthermore, HFT participation increases return synchronicity around earnings announcements when multiple firms in the same industry announce earnings on the same day. The evidence suggests that HFTs help incorporate relevant industry information, and this effect arises from HFTs’ liquidity supplying function. We address the endogenous preference of HFTs for large and liquid stocks by including multiple controls for firm size and liquidity, implementing abnormal or change specification for the price impact tests, and performing pre-treatment placebo tests for all of our analyses.

Is managerial rent extraction associated with tax aggressiveness? Evidence from informed insider trading

Despite the agency perspective of corporate tax avoidance, there is little empirical evidence that managers do extract rents derived from aggressive tax practices. This study investigates the association between tax aggressiveness and managerial rent extraction by focusing on informed insider trading, a self-serving action with an unambiguous impact on insiders’ personal wealth and representing the most direct channel through which managers expropriate outside shareholders. We find that insiders at firms more aggressive in tax avoidance gain significantly higher returns from insider purchases than insiders in less aggressive firms and this outperformance results from trading on future earnings news. We also find that insiders under the cover of aggressive tax practices more likely trade on bad news through insider sales and gain more from these trades. The overall evidence is consistent with aggressive tax planning serving managerial interests through gainfully exploiting private information and extracting rents from uninformed shareholders.

The role of institutional investors in post-earnings announcement drift: evidence from China

We examine how institutional investors influence post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD) in China. Our findings suggest that institutional holdings are positively correlated with PEAD in China, especially when institutional investors herd strongly on earnings news. This positive relationship is more salient for institutional investors with shorter investment horizons and in firms with higher information opacity. We also find that stock prices reverse in the fourth quarter after the earnings announcement. In contrast to the well-established view that institutional investors exploit PEAD and accelerate the speed of information incorporation, our findings suggest that they may instead exacerbate PEAD and slow down price discovery in emerging markets with different institutional backgrounds.

Mispricing firm-level productivity

Abstract This paper provides a mispricing-based explanation for the negative relation between firm-level productivity and stock returns. Investors appear to underprice unproductive firms and overprice productive firms. We find evidence consistent with the speculative overpricing of productive firms driven by investor sentiment and short sale constraints. Investors erroneously extrapolate past productivity growth and its associated operating performance and stock returns, despite their subsequent reversals. Such mispricing is perpetuated because of limits to arbitrage and is partially corrected around earnings announcements when investors are surprised by unexpected earnings news. Decomposition analysis indicates that extrapolative mispricing and limits to arbitrage explain most of the return predictability of firm-level productivity.

Tick Size Tolls: Can a Trading Slowdown Improve Earnings News Discovery?

ABSTRACT This study examines how an increase in tick size affects algorithmic trading (AT), fundamental information acquisition (FIA), and the price discovery process around earnings announcements (EAs). Leveraging the SEC's randomized Tick Size Pilot experiment, we show that a tick size increase results in a decline in AT and a sharp drop in absolute cumulative abnormal returns and volume around EAs. More importantly, we find increased FIA in the preannouncement period. Specifically, we show: (1) treatment firms' pre-announcement returns better anticipate next quarter's standardized unexpected earnings; (2) these firms experience an increase in EDGAR web traffic prior to EAs; and (3) they exhibit a drop in price synchronicity with index returns. Taken together, our evidence suggests that while an increase in tick size reduces AT and abnormal market reaction after EAs, it also increases FIA activities prior to EAs. JEL Classifications: M40; M41; G12; G14.

The Role of Institutional Investors in Post-Earnings Announcement Drift: Evidence from China

We examine how institutional investors influence post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD) in China. Our findings suggest that institutional holdings are positively correlated with PEAD in China, especially when institutional investors herd strongly on earnings news. This positive relationship is more salient for institutional investors with shorter investment horizons and in firms with higher information opacity. We also find that stock prices reverse in the fourth quarter after the earnings announcement. In contrast to the well-established view that institutional investors exploit PEAD and accelerate the speed of information incorporation, our findings suggest that they may instead exacerbate PEAD and slow down price discovery in emerging markets with different institutional backgrounds.

Impact of economic policy uncertainty on disclosure and pricing of earnings news

In this paper we examine the effect of economic policy uncertainty on reactions of capital market participants and actions of corporate managers. In particular, we investigate two issues: (1) whether the economic policy uncertainty has a short-term and long-term impact on the interpretation of earnings news and (2) whether the managers strategically time the release of good/bad news to the uncertainty in economic policies. We use a sample of 2973 unique firms from 1990 to 2016 and find that economic policy uncertainty lowers investors’ confidence in earnings, resulting in lower earnings response coefficient. Further test shows that the adverse effect of economic policy uncertainty on earnings informativeness is long-lasting and cannot be explained by the publicly available pre-disclosure information. We also find that firms are more likely to disclose bad news and losses when the economic policy uncertainty is high. These findings are not explained by earnings management and persist even after controlling for commonly used proxies of earnings management. Finally, we show that economic policy uncertainty is distinct from firm-specific uncertainty and that they both have incremental effects on the earnings response coefficient.

The Relevance of ‘Other Surprises’ in Explaining Earnings Announcement Returns

Previous research documents two puzzling results that cast doubt on the usefulness of accounting information to investors: the declining power of street EPS in explaining earnings announcement returns and increasing price reactions to earnings announcements. I show this evidence is due to omitting non-street EPS surprises from the earnings announcement analysis. When I control for ‘other surprises’ based on seven I/B/E/S most frequent forecasts: sales, gross margin, EBITDA, operating and net income, GAAP earnings and cash flows, the adjusted R2 increases over fourfold and street EPS lose explanatory power. The ‘other surprises’ are useful on their own and help interpret street EPS surprises, particularly small street EPS surprises, and earnings news of high accrual and growth stocks, and of high institutional ownership firms. Overall, the study identifies an important set of previously omitted variables that investors use in assessing earnings announcement day information.

The effect of option transaction costs on informed trading in the options market around earnings announcements

AbstractWe investigate the effect of option market transaction costs (a form of market imperfection) on the ability of option implied volatility‐based measures to predict future stock returns and volatility around quarterly earnings announcements. We find that the predictability is significantly stronger for firms with lower option relative bid‐ask spreads. The effect is more pronounced around positive rather than negative earnings news. We find no significant effect of option transaction costs around randomly chosen dates when there is no clustering of major information events. Trading strategies based on option market predictors and transaction costs earn monthly abnormal returns of 1.39% to 1.91%.

The Dark Side of Low Financial Reporting Frequency: Investors' Reliance on Alternative Sources of Earnings News and Excessive Information Spillovers

ABSTRACTThis paper examines how low financial reporting frequency affects investors' reliance on alternative sources of earnings information. We find that the returns of semi-annual earnings announcers (i.e., low reporting frequency stocks [LRF]) are almost twice as sensitive to the earnings announcement returns of U.S. industry bellwether peers for non-reporting periods compared to reporting periods. Strikingly, these heightened spillovers are followed by return reversals when investors finally observe own-firm earnings at the subsequent semi-annual earnings announcement. This indicates that investors periodically overreact to peer-firm earnings news in the absence of own-firm earnings disclosures in interim periods. We also find elevated price volatility and trading volume around earnings announcements for non-reporting periods, consistent with theories of investor overconfidence. Collectively, our results suggest that investors are unable to successfully offset the information loss arising from low reporting frequency, thus impairing their ability to value firms and adversely affecting the quality of financial markets.JEL Classifications: M41; M48; G14.Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.

The momentum effect in the Tunisian stock market: Risk hypothesis vs. underreaction hypothesis

The purpose of this paper is to examine two controversial explanations for the momentum in the Tunisian stock market: the risk hypothesis and the underreaction hypothesis. To address the risk issue, the five-factor model of Fama and French (2015) was used to estimate the momentum profits. We found a strong evidence of risk-adjusted momentum profits indicating that the risk cannot explain the momentum effect. To test the underreaction hypothesis, an event study was performed to track the market reaction to the information content of earnings before, on and after earnings announcement. We found that good earnings news are followed by positive abnormal returns; while bad earnings news are followed by negative abnormal returns over 12 months after the announcement date. Consistent with the underreaction hypothesis, these findings indicate that the market slowly adjusts in the same direction to the unexpected earnings. To control for this effect, we extended the five-factor model to include a factor based on unexpected earnings. We found that the momentum profits are captured by a zero-investment portfolio that is short on the portfolio with the lowest unexpected earnings and long on the portfolio with the highest unexpected earnings.