Stock Price Response to Earnings Announcements - Developed versus Emerging Economies

Abstract

This study aims to evaluate the usefulness and relevance of accounting earnings disclosures, as the key determinant of stock price changes. The main objective is to examine whether earnings response coefficient (ERC) behaviour could explain more fully the stock price changes, as to the reason why the stock price change is not equal to the number of announced earnings. The study is done with data sets from five countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) group and Malaysia. The analysis is then grouped into developed markets: Japan, UK, Sweden, and Switzerland; and emerging markets: Malaysia and Mexico, for the period 2001-2014. Two measures of abnormal returns are regressed against the size of the announced earnings. The first regression uses measures from individual events. The second regression uses a new measure; that is, from portfolios made out of all observations sorted by size of earnings into ten portfolios for each country and combination of countries. The portfolio method used was aimed at controlling possible idiosyncratic-errors-in-variables problem using individual event measures. The results using individual-event measures resulted in reasonable ERC sizes with high R2 explanatory power, a little higher than those reported in prior studies on other countries. Importantly, portfolio-based ERC is very close to the magnitude of the earnings in some tests, which supports the famous value relevance theory in accounting. This finding is new to this literature.

Keywords: Earnings Announcements, Share Prices, Earnings Response Coefficient, Emerging Economies, Developed Economies, Earnings Relevance, Portfolio Method