I provide evidence that investors overweight analyst forecasts by demonstrating that prices do not fully reflect predictable components of analyst errors, which conflicts with conclusions in prior research. I highlight estimation bias in traditional approaches and develop a new approach that reduces this bias. I estimate characteristic forecasts that map current firm characteristics into forecasts of future earnings. Contrasting characteristic and analyst forecasts predicts analyst forecast errors and revisions. I find abnormal returns to strategies that sort firms by predicted forecast errors, consistent with investors overweighting analyst forecasts and predictable biases in analyst forecasts influencing the information content of prices.

This study documents a six-fold increase in short-term return reversals during earnings announcements relative to non-announcement periods. Following prior research, we use reversals as a proxy for expected returns market makers demand for providing liquidity. Our findings highlight significant time-series variation in the magnitude of short-term return reversals and suggest that market makers demand higher expected returns prior to earnings announcements because of increased inventory risks that stem from holding net positions through the release of anticipated earnings news. Collectively, our findings suggest that uncertainty regarding anticipated information events elicits predictable increases in the compensation demanded for providing liquidity and that these increases significantly affect the dynamics and information content of market prices.

We develop a measure of how information events impact investors' expectations of risk. The measure is broadly applicable and simple to implement. We derive it from an option‐pricing model, where investors anticipate an announcement that simultaneously conveys information on the announcer's expected future cash flows and risk profile. We empirically implement the measure using firms' earnings announcements, showing that it closely aligns with our model's predictions and offers strong forecasting power for firms' risk profiles, costs of capital, and future investments. We further highlight pitfalls of using simple changes in option‐implied volatilities to study information gleaned from earnings announcements. Finally, we apply our measure to study disclosure regulation, the efficacy of text‐based proxies, and market‐wide events, which we use to illustrate our measure's uses, and illuminate its potential limitations.

We examine the information content of option and equity volumes when trade direction is unobserved. In a multimarket asymmetric information model, equity short-sale costs result in a negative relation between relative option volume and future firm value. In our empirical tests, firms in the lowest decile of the option to stock volume ratio (O/S) outperform the highest decile by 0.34% per week (19.3% annualized). Our model and empirics both indicate that O/S is a stronger signal when short-sale costs are high or option leverage is low. O/S also predicts future firm-specific earnings news, consistent with O/S reflecting private information.

It is well established that value stocks outperform glamour stocks, yet considerable debate exists about whether the return differential reflects compensation for risk or mispricing. Under mispricing explanations, prices of glamour (value) firms reflect systematically optimistic (pessimistic) expectations; thus, the value/glamour effect should be concentrated (absent) among firms with (without) ex ante identifiable expectation errors. Classifying firms based upon whether expectations implied by current pricing multiples are congruent with the strength of their fundamentals, we document that value/glamour returns and ex post revisions to market expectations are predictably concentrated (absent) among firms with ex ante biased (unbiased) market expectations.

This study seeks to determine whether earnings announcements pose non-diversifiable volatility risk that commands a risk premium. We find that investors anticipate some earnings announcements to convey news that increases market return volatility and pay a premium to hedge this non-diversifiable risk. In particular, we find evidence of risk premiums embedded in prices of firms' traded options that are significantly positively associated with the extent to which the firms' earnings announcements pose non-diversifiable volatility risk. In addition, we find that volatility risk premiums are concentrated among bellwether firms and result in predictable variation in option straddle returns around earnings announcements. Taken together, our findings show that some earnings announcements pose non-diversifiable volatility risk that commands a risk premium.

Using a unique data set of firms listed on China’s Shenzhen Stock Exchange, we show that investors’ corporate site visits convey information about future stock returns. Firms with abnormally frequent investor visits predictably outperform firms with abnormally infrequent investor visits by approximately 70-to-100 basis points per month. This return predictability concentrates on neglected firms with low trading volumes and when investors incur higher travel costs. Abnormally frequent investor visits accompany increased holdings among visiting institutions and predict improvements in firms’ fundamental performance, consistent with institutions using visits to gain an information advantage regarding underpriced firms. The significance of conducting site visits and in-depth research by fund companies is to consistently deliver stable and substantial returns to clients through professional expertise. (Lei Jing, CEO of Harvest Fund Management Co., Ltd., China)

Firms with central boards of directors earn superior risk-adjusted stock returns. A long (short) position in the most (least) central firms earns average annual returns of 4.68%. Firms with central boards also experience higher future return-on-assets growth and more positive analyst forecast errors. Return prediction, return-on-assets growth, and analyst errors are concentrated among high growth opportunity firms or firms confronting adverse circumstances, consistent with boardroom connections mattering most for firms standing to benefit most from information and resources exchanged through boardroom networks. Overall, our results suggest that director networks provide economic benefits that are not immediately reflected in stock prices.

We establish a link between firms managing investors’ performance expectations, earnings announcement premiums, and cyclical patterns (i.e., seasonalities) in returns. Firms that are more likely to manage expectations toward beatable levels predictably earn lower returns before, and higher returns during, their earnings announcements. This pattern repeats across firms’ fiscal quarters, suggesting firms manufacture positive “surprises” by negatively biasing investors’ expectations ahead of announcing earnings. We corroborate these findings using non-price-based outcomes indicative of expectations management. Together, our findings are consistent with the pressure for firms to meet earnings targets shaping the cross-section of firms’ stock returns.

Using a novel dataset, we show that components of firms’ GAAP earnings stemming from ancillary business activities or transitory shocks are significant in frequency and magnitude. These components have grown over time and are dispersed across various sections of the 10-K. Excluding them from GAAP earnings yields a core earnings measure that distinguishes between the recurring and non-recurring components of net income and forecasts future performance. Analysts and market participants are slow to impound these earnings components’ implications, particularly the amounts disclosed in the footnotes. Trading strategies that exploit non-core earnings produce abnormal returns of 8% per year.