We reexamine the time-series properties and determinants of the relation between aggregate earnings and returns (earnings response coefficient, ERC) employing return decompositions with longer historical data. We find that aggregate ERC is time-varying, above and beyond the evidence documented...

Motivated by investor disagreement and corporate disclosure literatures, we examine how stock price shocks affect future stock returns. We find that both large short-term price drops and hikes are followed by negative abnormal returns over the subsequent year, consistent with the conjecture that...

The implied cost of capital (ICC), the internal rate of return that equates speculative stock price to discounted expected future dividends, includes a mispricing-driven component in addition to expected return. The estimated relation of a mispricing-associated factor (X) with ICC is thus a...

This paper examines the effect of income smoothing on information uncertainty, stock returns, and cost of equity. I show that income smoothing through both total accruals and discretionary accruals tends to reduce firms' information uncertainty, as measured by stock return volatility, analyst...

We show that a lack of investor trust affects the revision of cash flow expectations and delays the incorporation of accounting information into the stock price. To overcome investors' dependence on trust, managers can obtain external certification—either through credit ratings or by employing...

We study the effect of a mandatory improvement in public disclosure due to the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) on the stock return predictability of shorting activity. To assess the impact of the disclosure shock, we measure monthly changes in the demand for and...

More than 650 U.S. public company executives predict the stock price response to their quarterly financial reports and share their prediction after under a nondisclosure agreement. Despite having full knowledge of the reports before their release, executives’ estimates differ from realized...

In this paper, I empirically test the conservatism effect of Barberis, Shleifer and Vishny (1998). Conditioning on a shock to quarterly earnings, firms ranking in the top (bottom) earnings shock quintile exhibit substantial price momentum over the next three-month periods following the initial...

We examine the effects of local newspapers on firms’ information environments. With newspaper employment dropping precipitously in the last few decades, we posit that these changes will have a detrimental effect on local firms’ information environments. Consistent with local news improving...

The prevailing view of implied volatility comovements, IVC, defined as the correlation between a firm's implied volatility and the market's implied volatility, is that they indicate the presence of systematic volatility risk to the firm's investors. We take a different stance and conjecture that...