This paper provides a framework and some empirical evidence to evaluate the seriousness of problems in inference that arise in stockreturn-based studies when the data are cross-sectionally dependent. The study is motivated on the grounds that statistical procedures designed to address such problems are often infeasible, and even when they can be implemented they sometimes introduce other more serious difficulties. Thus, researchers have frequently adopted an approach that ignores the cross-sectional dependence (e.g., ordinary least squares [OLS]). The objective of this paper is to help identify the contexts in which ignoring the dependence would lead to serious misstatement of significance levels. Cross-sectional dependence in stock returns data is likely to exist when at least some of the returns are sampled from common time periods. This would be the case in all studies of the reaction of stock prices to a

This paper examines the use of alternative information sets in the construction of inflation hedge portfolios. The study is motivated by consideration of the investor's problem in a multiperiod world. Several authors (e.g., Merton [1973] and Breeden [1979]) have shown that in a multiperiod setting, optimal investment behavior will, in general, involve holding portfolios that can be used to hedge against changes in certain relevant states of nature. One potentially relevant state of nature is the rate of inflation in general prices (Jones [1982] and Elton, Gruber, and Rentzler [1983]). In contrast to prior related research, the empirical results indicate that it is possible to construct inflation hedge portfolios successfully, if certain accounting information is used. However, portfolios constructed on the basis of historical security price information do not serve as effective hedges. One contribution of this paper is to demonstrate the potential usefulness of accounting information to a price-taking investor. Although financial statements play an important role in the setting of equilibrium

Stock markets myopia, Short term earnings, Future earnings, Mispricing

Post-Earnings-Announcement drift, Risk premium, Delayed market reaction, Incomplete risk adjustment

Victor L. Bernard, Thomas J. Frecka, Commodity Contracts and Common Stocks as Hedges against Relative Consumer Price Risk, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 169-188

Reviews the book "Accounting Research Methods: Do the facts Speak for Themselves?," by Wanda A. Wallace.

Based on stock price behavior around the release of annual reports in 1981 and 1982, Wilson [1987] concludes that for a given amount of earnings, the market reacts more favorably the larger (smaller) are cash flows (current accruals). The goals of this paper are to assess the generality of Wilson's finding and to assess alternative economic arguments that would manifest themselves as a "preference" for cash flows over current accruals. For the overall period, 1977-1984, there Ts no evidence of the simple relation observed by Wilson in his two-quarter test period. We then examine progressively more contextual models of the implications of cash flows and accruals. These models are also unsuccessful in explaining stock price behavior around the release of detailed financial statements. We conclude that either (1) the security price reactions to the release of cash flow and accrual data in financial statements are too highly contextual to be modeled parsimoniously, or (2) important uncertainties about the contents of detailed financial statements are resolved prior to their public release.

Previous investigations of the incremental information content of current cost Income have focused on cross-sectional analyses, which assume that the relation between stock returns and specific price-level adjustments is the same for all firms. Beaver et al. [1982] suggest that such analyses may be misspecified and provide preliminary indications that the Incremental information content of current cost Income may be more evident in a time-series context. The study summarized here provides the first formal examination of the information content of current cost income and historical cost Income within a time-series context. Some evidence of Incremental information content in current cost income is found in the time-series analysis, even though none is evident in a cross-sectional analysis. However, incremental Information content is (at best) evident only for a small subset of industries where the correlation between historical cost income and current cost income is low; for the majority of industries, the two income measures convey essentially the same information.

This study examines whether security analysts underreact or overreact to prior earnings information, and whether any such behavior could explain previously documented anomalous stock price movements. We present evidence that analysts' forecasts underreact to recent earnings. This feature of the forecasts is consistent with certain properties of the naive seasonal random walk forecast that Bernard and Thomas (1990) hypothesize underlie the well‐known anomalous post‐earnings‐announcement drift. However, the underreactions in analysts' forecasts are at most only about half as large as necessary to explain the magnitude of the drift. We also document that the “extreme” analysts' forecasts studied by DeBondt and Thaler (1990) cannot be viewed as overreactions to earnings, and are not clearly linked to the stock price overreactions discussed in DeBondt and Thaler ( 1985 , 1987 ) and Chopra, Lakonishok, and Ritter (Forthcoming). We conclude that security analysts' behavior is at best only a partial explanation for stock price underreaction to earnings, and may be unrelated to stock price overreactions.