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...

This article (1) identifies three sources of risk for tax shields (TS): Two of them are associated with debt risk and one is associated with operating risk. (2) A set of conditions for defining risky debt associated with cash flow, not with earnings, is presented. (3) It further shows that...

I identify three sources of risk for the tax shields: two of them associated to the risk of debt and one associated to the operating risk. I present a set of conditions for defining risky debt associated to cash flow and not to accounting earnings. I explain why realization of tax shields for...

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...

Stocks with high idiosyncratic volatility perform poorly relative to low idiosyncratic volatility stocks. We offer a novel explanation of this anomaly based on real options, which is consistent with earlier findings on idiosyncratic volatility (the positive contemporaneous relation between...

Two ex-ante variables are introduced to characterize the analysts' biased behavior, namely the analysts' disagreement and self-selection in analysts' earnings forecasts. The study investigates the impact of the analysts' disagreement and self-selection on the stock returns. A theoretical...

Firms with lower profitability have lower expected returns because such firms perform better than expected when market volatility increases. The better-than-expected performance arises because unprofitable firms are distressed and volatile, their equity resembles a call option on the assets, and...

We examine the implications of short-run and long-run consumption risks on the momentum and long-term contrarian profits and the value premium in a unified economic framework. By introducing time-varying firm cash flow exposures to the short-run and long-run shocks in consumption growth, we find...

Simple Bayesian learning models, such as those proposed by Lewellen and Shanken (2002) and Pastor and Veronesi (2003, 2006), suggest that new (additional) information reduces posterior variance of investor expectation for the unobservable. Consistent with such common wisdom, Dubinsky and...

We show that 71% of the earnings announcement premium takes place before, rather than after, earning releases. We attribute this pattern to uncertainty resolution before earnings announcement, and provide compelling evidence that high uncertainty stocks experience more uncertainty resolution and...