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Journal of Financial Economics Vol. 152 2024

Disagreement about public information quality and informational price efficiency

Chong Huang1; Radhika Lunawat1; Qiguang Wang2

1 University of California, Irvine · 2 Hong Kong Baptist University

Abstract

Investors often hold differing opinions on public information quality. This paper shows that such investor disagreement provides a novel explanation for financial market dynamics around earnings announcements. We propose a rational expectations equilibrium model where investors disagree about the precision of a public signal, which separates a pre-news trading period from a post-news trading period. In equilibrium, investor disagreement about public signal precision diminishes informational price efficiency before the news, but enhances it afterward. Consequently, investor disagreement leads to a notable jump in informed trading around the news, a decline in abnormal trading volume before the news and a surge immediately after the news, and underreaction of stock price to announced earnings.

DOI
10.1016/j.jfineco.2023.103762
Volume
152
Pages
103762
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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