Journal of Accounting,Auditing & Finance

We document a pattern in the day-of-the-week timing of future earnings announcements that is predictable from knowledge of the current quarter's earnings. The pattern mimics the predictable (+, +,0, -) dependence previously reported in both seasonally differenced quarterly earnings themselves and in estimated abnormal returns at future quarterly earnings announcement dates (the “SUE effect”; see Rendleman, Jones, and Latané [1987]; Bernard and Thomas [1990]). The predictability of abnormal returns at future earnings announcement dates therefore is not independent of the well-documented day-of-the-week seasonal in stock returns (the “DOW effect”; see Osborne [1962]; Cross [1973]; French [1980]; Gibbons and Hess [1981]). Although the DOW effect is too small to fully explain the SUE effect, it appears to contribute to it, since both past SUE and current earnings announcement DOW are incremental in explaining announcement-day estimated abnormal returns. The unclear role of size and the presence of errors in estimating both unexpected earnings and its announcement day suggest caution in interpreting these results.

This paper presents empirical evidence that previously disclosed financial ratio information is useful in explaining differential market reactions for a cross-section of firms facing subsequent common industry-level changes. We focus our attention on the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 (Public Law 95-504), which was aimed at complete deregulation of the U.S. airline industry after 40 years of federal regulation. Our empirical results indicate that market reaction to the deregulatory changes is positively associated with operating performance and asset utilization. This suggests that an airline firm's operating efficiency as measured by these ratios is a key determinant of how investors expect it to perform in a deregulated competitive environment.

A number of studies have examined the correlation between financial statement disclosures and share prices to assess the informativeness of these disclosures. There are several potential econometric problems with analyses of this type, and the interpretations of the results depend critically on the type of econometric problem. For example, the results of these studies should not be used to answer accounting policy questions unless the effect of an omitted variable bias is likely to be minimal. Given potential interpretation problems, we argue that analysis of model misspecification should be performed to isolate the form of misspecification. The contribution of this paper is to suggest a series of tests to perform this task. We use these tests to assess the importance of misspecification in adaptations of Barth's (1994) investment securities valuation model and Beaver et al.'s (1989) model of loan loss valuation. We find compelling evidence of the importance of misspecification apart from measurement error (e.g., omitted variables) in the model of investment securities valuation, but find only weak evidence of any misspecification other than measurement error in the loan loss valuation model.

When corporate management issues an earnings forecast there are potentially two surprises. One potential surprise is that a forecast was issued and the other is the surprise in the earnings forecast. Accordingly, the observed stock market reaction to management earnings forecasts may be due to one or the other, or both. This study decomposes the cross-sectional variability in stock market reactions to management earnings forecasts into the portions attributable to the forecast surprise and the earnings surprise. The results indicate that the market's reaction is a function of both the earnings surprise and the forecast surprise. However, the market reaction is more associated with forecast surprise than with the earnings surprise. This suggests that results in previous studies on the market reactions to management earnings forecasts may need to be reconsidered.