IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mit/sloanp/1765.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Testing Behavioral Finance Theories Using Trends and Sequences in Financial Performance

Author

Listed:
  • Chan, Wesley
  • Frankel, Richard
  • Kothari, S.P.

Abstract

Models based on psychological biases can explain momentum and reversal in stock returns, but risk overfitting of theory to data. We examine a central psychological bias, representativeness, which underlies many behavioral-finance theories. According to this bias, individuals form predictions about future outcomes based on how closely past outcomes fit certain categories. To produce out-of sample tests, we use accounting performance to identify these categories and test the idea that investors misclassify firms and thus make biased forecasts. We find evidence of short-term accounting momentum, consistent with the idea that investors fail to immediately incorporate new information, but find no support for long-term reversal related to accounting performance. Contrary to theory, we find little evidence that the consistency of past accounting performance is related to future returns

Suggested Citation

  • Chan, Wesley & Frankel, Richard & Kothari, S.P., 2002. "Testing Behavioral Finance Theories Using Trends and Sequences in Financial Performance," Working papers 4375-02, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management.
    • Handle: RePEc:mit:sloanp:1765
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/1765
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lakonishok, Josef & Shleifer, Andrei & Vishny, Robert W, 1994. "Contrarian Investment, Extrapolation, and Risk," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 49(5), pages 1541-1578, December.
    2. Bernard, Victor L. & Thomas, Jacob K., 1990. "Evidence that stock prices do not fully reflect the implications of current earnings for future earnings," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(4), pages 305-340, December.
    3. Bernard, Vl & Thomas, Jk, 1989. "Post-Earnings-Announcement Drift - Delayed Price Response Or Risk Premium," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27, pages 1-36.
    4. Rabin, Matthew, 2000. "Inference by Believers in the Law of Small Numbers," Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt4sw8n41t, Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
    5. La Porta, Rafael, et al, 1997. "Good News for Value Stocks: Further Evidence on Market Efficiency," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 52(2), pages 859-874, June.
    6. Carhart, Mark M, 1997. "On Persistence in Mutual Fund Performance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 52(1), pages 57-82, March.
    7. Barth, ME & Elliott, JA & Finn, MW, 1999. "Market rewards associated with patterns of increasing earnings," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 37(2), pages 387-413.
    8. Kent Daniel & David Hirshleifer & Avanidhar Subrahmanyam, 1998. "Investor Psychology and Security Market Under- and Overreactions," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 53(6), pages 1839-1885, December.
    9. Daniel, Kent & Hirshleifer, David & Teoh, Siew Hong, 2002. "Investor psychology in capital markets: evidence and policy implications," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(1), pages 139-209, January.
    10. Barberis, Nicholas & Shleifer, Andrei & Vishny, Robert, 1998. "A model of investor sentiment," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(3), pages 307-343, September.
    11. David Hirshleifer, 2001. "Investor Psychology and Asset Pricing," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(4), pages 1533-1597, August.
    12. Ball, Ray & Kothari, S. P. & Shanken, Jay, 1995. "Problems in measuring portfolio performance An application to contrarian investment strategies," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 38(1), pages 79-107, May.
    13. Cohen, Randolph B. & Gompers, Paul A. & Vuolteenaho, Tuomo, 2002. "Who underreacts to cash-flow news? evidence from trading between individuals and institutions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(2-3), pages 409-462.
    14. Shleifer, Andrei & Vishny, Robert W, 1997. "The Limits of Arbitrage," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 52(1), pages 35-55, March.
    15. Fama, Eugene F, 1991. "Efficient Capital Markets: II," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 46(5), pages 1575-1617, December.
    16. Harrison Hong & Jeremy C. Stein, 1999. "A Unified Theory of Underreaction, Momentum Trading, and Overreaction in Asset Markets," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 54(6), pages 2143-2184, December.
    17. Ball, R & Brown, P, 1968. "Empirical Evaluation Of Accounting Income Numbers," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 6(2), pages 159-178.
    18. Narasimhan Jegadeesh & Sheridan Titman, 2001. "Profitability of Momentum Strategies: An Evaluation of Alternative Explanations," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(2), pages 699-720, April.
    19. Dechow, Patricia M. & Sloan, Richard G., 1997. "Returns to contrarian investment strategies: Tests of naive expectations hypotheses," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(1), pages 3-27, January.
    20. Jegadeesh, Narasimhan & Titman, Sheridan, 1993. "Returns to Buying Winners and Selling Losers: Implications for Stock Market Efficiency," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 48(1), pages 65-91, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Francis, Jennifer & LaFond, Ryan & Olsson, Per & Schipper, Katherine, 2003. "Accounting Anomalies and Information Uncertainty," SIFR Research Report Series 13, Institute for Financial Research.
    2. Lect. Aurora Murgea Ph. D, 2010. "Classical Lassical And Behavioural Finance In Investor Decision," Annals of University of Craiova - Economic Sciences Series, University of Craiova, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, vol. 2(38), pages 1-12, May.
    3. Jing Chen, 2005. "Information Theory and Market Behavior," Finance 0503009, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Daniel, Kent & Hirshleifer, David & Teoh, Siew Hong, 2002. "Investor psychology in capital markets: evidence and policy implications," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(1), pages 139-209, January.
    2. Chan, Wesley S. & Frankel, Richard & Kothari, S.P., 2004. "Testing behavioral finance theories using trends and consistency in financial performance," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 38(1), pages 3-50, December.
    3. Schwert, G. William, 2003. "Anomalies and market efficiency," Handbook of the Economics of Finance, in: G.M. Constantinides & M. Harris & R. M. Stulz (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Finance, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 15, pages 939-974, Elsevier.
    4. Lu Zhang, 2017. "The Investment CAPM," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 23(4), pages 545-603, September.
    5. Kothari, S. P., 2001. "Capital markets research in accounting," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 31(1-3), pages 105-231, September.
    6. David Hirshleifer, 2001. "Investor Psychology and Asset Pricing," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(4), pages 1533-1597, August.
    7. Erica X. N. Li & Dmitry Livdan & Lu Zhang, 2009. "Anomalies," Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(11), pages 4301-4334, November.
    8. Jiang, George J. & Zhu, Kevin X., 2017. "Information Shocks and Short-Term Market Underreaction," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 124(1), pages 43-64.
    9. Fernando Rubio, 2005. "Eficiencia De Mercado, Administracion De Carteras De Fondos Y Behavioural Finance," Finance 0503028, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 23 Jul 2005.
    10. Dionysia Dionysiou, 2015. "Choosing Among Alternative Long-Run Event-Study Techniques," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(1), pages 158-198, February.
    11. Stephen A. Gorman & Frank J. Fabozzi, 2021. "The ABC’s of the alternative risk premium: academic roots," Journal of Asset Management, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 22(6), pages 405-436, October.
    12. Adam Zaremba & Jacob Koby Shemer, 2018. "Price-Based Investment Strategies," Springer Books, Springer, number 978-3-319-91530-2, January.
    13. Cohen, Randolph B. & Gompers, Paul A. & Vuolteenaho, Tuomo, 2002. "Who underreacts to cash-flow news? evidence from trading between individuals and institutions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 66(2-3), pages 409-462.
    14. Minye Zhang & Yongheng Deng, 2010. "Is the Mean Return of Hotel Real Estate Stocks Apt to Overreact to Past Performance?," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 40(4), pages 497-543, May.
    15. Kariofyllas, Spyridon & Philippas, Dionisis & Siriopoulos, Costas, 2017. "Cognitive biases in investors' behaviour under stress: Evidence from the London Stock Exchange," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 54-62.
    16. Glaser, Markus & Nöth, Markus & Weber, Martin, 2003. "Behavioral finance," Papers 03-14, Sonderforschungsbreich 504.
    17. David Hirshleife, 2015. "Behavioral Finance," Annual Review of Financial Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 7(1), pages 133-159, December.
    18. Razvan Stefanescu & Ramona Dumitriu, 2016. "Contrarian and Momentum Profits during Periods of High Trading Volume preceded by Stock Prices Shocks," Risk in Contemporary Economy, "Dunarea de Jos" University of Galati, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, pages 378-384.
    19. Benjamin Chabot & Eric Ghysels & Ravi Jagannathan, 2009. "Momentum Cycles and Limits to Arbitrage Evidence from Victorian England and Post-Depression US Stock Markets," NBER Working Papers 15591, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    20. Azevedo, Vitor, 2023. "Analysts’ underreaction and momentum strategies," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 146(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Behavioral Finance; Behavioral-finance;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mit:sloanp:1765. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: None (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ssmitus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.