Earnings announcements present a clear risk to investors and, under rational asset pricing theory, such risk should be consistently priced in stocks. However, we find that stocks with high earnings announcement risk earn significantly higher returns only during months when firms have earnings or...

The relation between average equity return and market exposure behaves distinctively on days on which early earnings announcements are made by firms for which the announcements have a large spillover “influence” on discount rates and expectations of earnings for related firms. On such days...

The literature on ‘cash flow' or ‘earnings' beta is theoretically well-motivated in its use of fundamentals, instead of returns, to measure systematic risk. However, empirical measures of earnings beta based on either log-linearizing the return equation or log-linearizing the clean-surplus...

We apply state-of-the-art financial machine learning to assess the return-predictive value of more than 45,000 earnings announcements on a majority of S&P1500 constituents. To represent the diverse information content of earnings announcements, we generate predictor variables based on various...

We correlate analysts' forecast errors with temporal variation in investor sentiment. We find that when sentiment is high, analysts' forecasts of one-year-ahead earnings and long-term earnings growth are relatively more optimistic for “uncertain” or “difficult to value” firms. Adding...

We document a significant positive relation between earnings announcement idiosyncratic volatility and stock returns in the 10-day window before future earnings announcements. The average of risk-adjusted return differences between stocks with the highest earnings announcement idiosyncratic...