We argue the earnings announcement premium is a measure of firm-specific uncertainty aversion. Our stylized model shows earnings announcements, as pure news events, are priced only if investors are uncertainty averse; further, the earnings announcement return is negatively correlated to future...

Firms scheduled to report earnings earn an annualized abnormal return of 9.9%. We propose a risk-based explanation for this phenomenon, in which investors use announcements to revise their expectations for non-announcing firms, but can only do so imperfectly. Consequently, the covariance between...