Post-earnings Announcement Drift Research Articles

Insider Trading and the Post-Earnings Announcement Drift

We show that trades by corporate insiders after an earnings announcement determine in part the extent of the post-earnings announcement drift anomaly. Contrarian trades mitigate the under-reaction to earnings announcements, and confirmatory trades allow for price discovery with price movements continuing in the same direction of the earnings surprise. These results are consistent with insider trading being a mechanism that provides relevant information on transitory or permanent changes to the earnings process allowing the market to make appropriate inferences about the nature of the earnings surprise.

Information Asymmetry and Trading in Dark Pools: Evidence From Earnings Announcement and Analyst Recommendation Revisions

Using the first and recently available universe of dark pool trading in the U.S. from FINRA, we document trading patterns around scheduled and unscheduled corporate information events. We find that there is more trading in dark pools in the week of earnings announcement as well as analyst recommendation revision relative to trading in exchanges as well as relative to non-news weeks. As predicted by theory, the extent of trading in the dark pools is a function of ownership by institutional investors who are endowed with short-lived information. We document that there is pre-news week trading. Hinting at broker-customer conflict, we find that pre-week trading happens in dark pools where proprietary flow is allowed. Post-earnings announcement drift is stronger for stocks with higher levels of dark pool trading indicating that dark pools delay price discovery. Information about dark volume is informative to equity markets.

Herding on Earnings News: The Role of Institutional Investors in Post–Earnings-Announcement Drift

We examine the role of institutional investors underlying post–earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). Our results show that while institutional investors generally herd on earnings news, such correlated trading among institutions does not eliminate or reduce market underreaction to earnings surprises. Instead, PEAD is significant only in the subsample of stocks where institutions herd in the same direction as earnings surprises. In fact, institutional herding is also positively related to next-quarter earnings announcement returns. We provide evidence that institutional herding on or against earnings news is largely driven by firm characteristics, particularly past firm performance and stock returns. In addition, we find that relative to nontransient institutions, transient institutions have a stronger tendency to herd on earnings information. Finally, based on long-run stock returns, we show that when institutions herd on earnings surprises, institutional trading represents a gradual process of incorporating information into stock prices. However, when institutions herd against earnings surprises, institutional trading slows down stock price discovery.

Flight-To-Dividends: The Role of Earnings in Periods of Capital Scarcity

We examine the link between the scarcity of arbitrage capital and investors’ response to firms’ earnings information. The cost of financing levered investment strategies (i.e., investing with borrowed funds) increases in the risk profile of the securities being traded. As a result, when capital is scarce, levered traders face heightened incentives to tilt their portfolios in the direction of firms’ earnings information as an indicator of lesser risk because doing so mitigates financing constraints. Our results suggest these investors become more responsive to firms’ earnings announcements when capital is scarce. Moreover, market prices display a stronger reaction to firms’ announcements and less post-earnings announcement drift. Together, our findings suggest the scarcity of arbitrage capital spurs both the use of, and responsiveness of market prices to, firms’ earnings news.

Institutional Investment Constraints and Stock Prices

We test the hypothesis that investment constraints in delegated portfolio management may distort demand for stocks, leading to price underreaction to news and stock return predictability. We find that institutions tend not to buy more of a stock with good news that they already overweight; they are reluctant to sell a stock with bad news that they already underweight. Stocks with good news overweighted by institutions subsequently significantly outperform stocks with bad news underweighted by institutions. The impact of institutional investment constraints sheds new light on asset pricing anomalies such as stock price momentum and post–earnings announcement drift.

Competitive earnings news and post-earnings announcement drift

Using a large sample covering the period 1996–2015, we find a positive relation between the return of the announced firm on the date of peer firms' announcements and industry-wide earnings news of peer firms. Our results imply that same-industry-peer earnings announcements play a role in the analyst forecast-based drift, and are consistent with the notion of intra-industry information transfers. Additional analyses show that economic conditions and the relative size of the rival firms can affect the nature and magnitude of the link between announced firm's return surrounding the date of the rival firm's announcements and the rival firms' industry-wide component of earnings surprises. We also document evidence that is more consistent with analyst forecast-based drift reflecting investors exhibiting limited attention behavior as opposed to investors' conservatism bias. Our results are robust across different estimations and clustering procedures.

Herding on Earnings News: The Role of Institutional Investors in Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift

We examine the role of institutional investors underlying post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). Our results show that while institutional investors generally herd on earnings news, such correlated trading among institutions does not eliminate or reduce market underreaction to earnings surprises. Instead, PEAD is significant only in the subsample of stocks where institutions herd in the same direction as earnings surprises. In fact, institutional herding is also positively related to next-quarter earnings announcement returns. We provide evidence that institutional herding on or against earnings news is largely driven by firm characteristics, particularly past firm performance and stock returns. In addition, we find that relative to non-transient institutions, transient institutions have a stronger tendency to herd on earnings information. Finally, based on long-run stock returns, we show that when institutions herd on earnings surprises, institutional trading represents a gradual process of incorporating information into stock prices. On the other hand, when institutions herd against earnings surprises, institutional trading slows down stock price discovery.

Earnings announcement effect on the Tunisian stock market

This paper treats the post-earnings announcement drift. Precisely, it revisits the benefits announcement effect using various measurements of surprise unexpected earnings. In addition, this work tr...

Does Voluntary Balance Sheet Disclosure Mitigate Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift?

Theory suggests that balance sheet information helps investors assess a firm’s profitability and estimate earnings growth. We therefore predict that voluntary balance sheet disclosure at the time of an earnings announcement helps investors promptly understand the implication of current earnings news for future earnings and subsequently reduces post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). Consistent with these predictions, our results show that when firms provide voluntary balance sheet disclosures, the earnings response coefficient in the event window is significantly higher and the corresponding PEAD is significantly lower. We further find that the impact of voluntary balance sheet disclosure on PEAD is more pronounced when book value is more informative or when earnings uncertainty is higher, consistent with our conjecture that helping investors to better understand future earnings performance is a key mechanism underlying the effect of balance sheet disclosure on PEAD.

Local Bias in Google Search and the Market Response around Earnings Announcements

ABSTRACTWe examine the impact of distance on internet search, and the effect of the “local bias” in search on the stock market response around earnings announcements. We find significant local bias in search behavior. Motivated by theories explaining local bias, local information advantage, and familiarity bias, we predict and find that firms with higher local bias in search experience higher bid-ask spreads, lower trading volumes, and lower earnings response coefficients at the time of earnings announcements, consistent with non-local investors relying more than locals on public information announcements. Consistent with local information advantage, we find that in the week prior to the announcement, firms with higher local bias have higher bid-ask spreads, higher trading volumes, and returns that are more predictive of the coming earnings surprise. Consistent with familiarity bias, firms with higher local bias in search experience stronger post-earnings announcement drift. We use unique predictions, propensity score matching, and two-stage least squares to identify the effects of local bias separately from the effects of overall visibility. Overall, we show there is significant local bias in search, and that this local bias has a significant impact on the market response around earnings announcements.

The Information Content of Guidance and Earnings

I compare the information content of quarterly earnings guidance and quarterly earnings by examining their associations with current and future stock returns when the two signals are bundled at earnings announcements. At the bundled announcement, I find a significantly stronger association between announcement returns and guidance news. From the day after the bundled announcement through the next earnings announcement, both signals generate abnormal return drifts of about 200 basis points. However, the timing of the post-announcement returns differs considerably. For guidance, about 50% of the post-announcement drift occurs at the next earnings announcement. In contrast, for earnings, about 20% of the preceding drift reverses at the next earnings announcement. Investor ignorance of the drift following guidance news coupled with a fixation on post-earnings announcement drift potentially explains this surprising difference in the timing of the post-announcement returns. Overall, this study indicates that bundled quarterly earnings guidance contains more information than quarterly earnings and that investors incorrectly overweight the earnings news and underweight the guidance news during the post-announcement period until the next earnings announcement.

Information in the Tails of the Distribution of Analysts’ Quarterly Earnings Forecasts

Investors generally measure earnings announcement news on the basis of the difference between actual earnings and two salient benchmarks: earnings in the same quarter the previous year and a consensus drawn from a distribution of forecasts by financial analysts. We evaluate the implications of a third salient benchmark: the most optimistic forecast when actual earnings exceed the consensus and the most pessimistic forecast when the consensus exceeds actual earnings. We find that considering the information in these tails of the distribution of analysts’ earnings forecasts enhances the profitability of post–earnings announcement drift strategies.

Ownership Structure, Limits to Arbitrage, and Stock Returns: Evidence from Equity Lending Markets

We examine how institutional ownership structure gives rise to limits to arbitrage through its impact on short-sale constraints. Stocks with lower, more concentrated, short-term, and less passive ownership exhibit lower lending supply, higher costs of shorting, and higher arbitrage risk. These constraints limit the ability of arbitrageurs to take short positions and delay the correction of mispricing. Stocks with more concentrated ownership exhibit smaller announcement day reactions, larger post-earnings announcement drift, and an additional negative abnormal return of 0.47% in the week following a positive shorting demand shock.Received June 16, 2014; accepted June 8, 2016 by Editor Laura Starks.

Ownership Structure and Limits to Arbitrage in the Equity Lending Market

We examine how institutional ownership structure gives rise to limits to arbitrage through its impact on short-sale constraints. Stocks with lower, more concentrated, short-term, and less passive ownership exhibit lower lending supply, higher costs of shorting, and higher arbitrage risk. These constraints limit the ability of arbitrageurs to take short positions and delay the correction of mispricing. Stocks with more concentrated ownership exhibit smaller announcement day reactions, larger post-earnings announcement drift, and an additional negative abnormal return of -0.47% in the week following a positive shorting demand shock.

Shocks to Product Networks and Post-Earnings Announcement Drift

This paper examines whether shocks to less visible product market network peers explain industry level post-earnings announcement drift (IPEAD). On the real-side, we find that peer earnings shocks propagate slowly through the peer network, creating a complex and conditional autocorrelation structure in earnings shocks. This impacts the financial-side, and IPEAD arises only when shocked peers are less visible in the network and when shocks are driven by persistent supply-side shocks to expenses rather than by demand-side shocks to sales. In addition, IPEAD is particularly strong when 10-K expense disclosures are opaque. Collectively, our results suggest that inattention to less visible peers, complex autocorrelation in earnings shocks, and a poor informational environment on the expense side are likely channels that generate IPEAD. IPEAD returns are economically large in subsamples motivated by this explanation.

Insider Trading and Post-Earnings Announcement Drift

This paper examines the association between insider trading during the pre-earnings announcement period and the magnitude of the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD). Consistent with insiders’ private information being incorporated into prices through their trading, we find PEAD is significantly lower when earnings announcements are preceded by insider trading. This negative association between insider trading and PEAD is stronger when information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders is higher, and when internal and external monitoring of insider trades is weaker. However, in contrast to our primary results, we find that in cases of confirming insider trading (i.e., high levels of insider buying (selling) preceding large positive (negative) earnings surprises), PEAD is significantly larger. Our evidence suggests such trades are based on insiders’ private information about earnings surprises in subsequent quarters and the market fails to fully account for the information contained in these trades. Overall, our findings indicate insider trading contributes to stock pricing efficiency by conveying insiders’ private information to the market.

Losing sight of the trees for the forest? Attention allocation and anomalies

This paper tests asset pricing implications of the investor attention shift hypothesis proposed in theoretical work. We create a novel proxy for the dynamics of inattention towards firm-specific information and explore its impact on prominent return anomalies. As hypothesized and with all else equal, the proxy positively predicts the post-earnings announcement drift as well as the profitability of pairs trading, and negatively predicts the success of momentum strategies. Taken together, our findings highlight the importance of time-varying investor attention allocation for the price discovery process.

Further evidence on the strategic timing of earnings news: Joint analysis of weekdays and times of day

Using combinations of weekdays and times of day (before, during, and after trading hours) of earnings announcements, we examine whether managers attempt to strategically time these announcements. We document that the worst earnings news is announced on Friday evening and find robust evidence that only Friday evening announcements represent managers’ rational opportunistic behavior. Friday evening announcements are followed by insider trading in the direction of earnings news and the largest post-earnings announcement drift. Managers also attempt to reduce interaction with investors and hide more than just earnings news by announcing on Friday evening. We find that Friday evening announcements occur later in the evening than announcements on other evenings, firms have a reduced propensity to hold conference calls, and major firm restructuring events are relatively more likely to occur after Friday evening announcements.

Insider Trading and PEAD

This paper examines the association between insider trading during the pre-earnings announcement period and the magnitude of the post-earnings announcement drift (PEAD). Consistent with insiders’ private information being incorporated into prices through their trading, we find PEAD is significantly lower when earnings announcements are preceded by insider trading. This negative association between insider trading and PEAD is stronger when information asymmetry between insiders and outsiders is higher, and when internal and external monitoring of insider trades is weaker. However, in contrast to our primary results, we find that in cases of confirming insider trading (i.e., high levels of insider buying (selling) preceding large positive (negative) earnings surprises), PEAD is significantly larger. Our evidence suggests such trades are based on insiders’ private information about earnings surprises in subsequent quarters and the market fails to fully account for the information contained in these trades. Overall, our findings indicate insider trading contributes to stock pricing efficiency by conveying insiders’ private information to the market.

Accounting Quality, Liquidity Risk, and Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift

Recent microstructure research finds that liquidity risk, in particular its information component, plays an important role in explaining the post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). We decompose liquidity risk into an accounting-associated component and a nonaccounting-associated component and examine their relative importance in explaining PEAD. Our research is motivated by recent findings that liquidity risk is a systematic risk and earnings quality is negatively associated with liquidity risk. We find that the accounting-associated component is more strongly related to PEAD returns than is its nonaccounting-associated counterpart. Further analyses reveal that the relation between accounting-associated liquidity risk and PEAD returns is weaker for firms with greater analyst following. We also find that in a significant market downturn, the relation between accounting-associated liquidity risk and PEAD returns becomes more pronounced. Our study is the first to document a liquidity risk-based role of accounting quality in explaining the PEAD phenomenon. It parses out the PEAD risk premia associated with accounting versus nonaccounting sources and, by so doing, sheds light on the role of accounting quality in shaping the liquidity risk-PEAD returns relation. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.