Disclosures, Disclosure quality, FAF ratings, Returns

We investigate the stock returns subsequent to quarterly earnings surprises, where the benchmark for an earnings surprise is the consensus analyst forecast. By defining the surprise relative to an analyst forecast rather than a time‐series model of expected earnings, we document returns subsequent to earnings announcements that are much larger, persist for much longer, and are more heavily concentrated in the long portion of the hedge portfolio than shown in previous studies. We show that our results hold after controlling for risk and previously documented anomalies, and are positive for every quarter between 1988 and 2000. Finally, we explore the financial results and information environment of firms with extreme earnings surprises and find that they tend to be “neglected” stocks with relatively high book‐to‐market ratios, low analyst coverage, and high analyst forecast dispersion. In the three subsequent years, firms with extreme positive earnings surprises tend to have persistent earnings surprises in the same direction, strong growth in cash flows and earnings, and large increases in analyst coverage, relative to firms with extreme negative earnings surprises. We also show that the returns to the earnings surprise strategy are highest in the quartile of firms where transaction costs are highest and institutional investor interest is lowest, consistent with the idea that market inefficiencies are more prevalent when frictions make it difficult for large, sophisticated investors to exploit the inefficiencies.

This paper studies how firm disclosure activity affects the relation between current annual stock returns, contemporaneous annual earnings and future earnings. Our results show that firms with relatively more informative disclosures “bring the future forward” so that current returns reflect more future earnings news. We also find that changes in disclosure activity are positively related to changes in the importance of future earnings news for current returns. These results suggest that a firm’s disclosure activity reveals credible, relevant information not in current earnings, and that this information is incorporated into the current stock price.

Segment reporting, Competition, Aggregation, Private information

We examine corporate disclosure activity around seasoned equity offerings and its relationship to stock prices. Beginning six months before the offering, our sample issuing firms dramatically increase their disclosure activity, particularly for the categories of disclosure over which firms have the most discretion. The increase is significant after controlling for the firm's current and future earnings performance and tends to be largest for firms with selling shareholders participating in the offering. However, there is no change in the frequency of forward‐looking statements prior to the equity offering, something that is expressly discouraged by the securities law. Firms that maintain a consistent level of disclosure experience price increases prior to the offering, and only minor price declines at the offering announcement relative to the control firms, suggesting that disclosure may have reduced the information asymmetry inherent in the offering. Firms that substantially increase their disclosure activity in the six months before the offering also experience price increases prior to the offering relative to the control firms, but suffer much larger price declines at the announcement of their intent to issue equity, suggesting that the disclosure increase may have been used to “hype the stock” and the market may have partially corrected for the earlier price increase. Firms that maintain a consistent disclosure level have no unusual return behavior relative to the control firms subsequent to the announcement, while the firms that “hyped” their stock continue to suffer negative returns, providing further evidence that the increased disclosure activity may have been hype, and suggesting that the hype may have been successful in lowering the firms' cost of equity capital.

In this study, the authors report the results from laboratory asset markets designed to test the rational expectations hypothesis that markets aggregate and transmit the information of differentially informed traders. After documenting evidence in favor of the rational expectations model, they examine which features of their environment are necessary or sufficient to achieve an rational expectations equilibrium. The authors find that trading experience and common knowledge of dividends are jointly sufficient to achieve a rational expectations equilibrium, but that neither is a sufficient condition by itself. They also present some stylized facts about the convergence process leading to a rational expectations equilibrium.

We document how the effectiveness of an accruals-based trading strategy changes with the benchmark used to identify an extreme accrual. We measure “percent accruals” as accruals scaled by earnings, rather than total assets, and show that this seemingly small change produces a radically different sort of the data. We find that a trading strategy based on percent accruals yields significantly larger annual hedge returns than the traditional accruals measure, and does so mostly by improving the long position in low-accrual stocks. The hedge returns are also significant in all but the lowest quintile of arbitrage risk. We show that percent accruals more effectively select firms where the difference between sophisticated and nai¨ve forecasts are the most extreme. As such, our results are consistent with the earnings fixation hypothesis and are inconsistent with some alternative explanations for the accrual anomaly.

Presents three different models designed to elucidate how the disclosure of public information can enhance the welfare of traders in a financial market when some or all traders also have access to costly private information. Ex ante expected utility; Reversal of the Diamond model; Use of public signals to enhance the welfare of uninformed traders.

Examines the relations between the disclosure practices of firms, the number of analysts following each firm and properties of the analysts' earnings forecasts. Forecast dispersion and disclosure; Forecast accuracy and disclosure; Volatility of forecast revisions and disclosure.