IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedgfe/2003-58.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Getting bad news out early: does it really help stock prices?

Author

Listed:
  • Chris Downing
  • Steven A. Sharpe

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the stock price benefit of meeting or beating earnings expectations. Using a general methodology, we find no evidence that the timing of earnings news has any benefit for firms' stock returns. In fact, in many cases we find firms attempting to engineer positive earnings surprises by beating down expectations only to discover that their efforts are counterproductive. Our results appear to overturn the findings of previous authors who, using less general methodologies, have suggested that firms can boost their stock returns by getting bad news out early. Our results are robust across time periods, for different scaling factors on earnings revisions and surprises, when controlling for firm size and growth prospects, and when conditioned on past earnings news.

Suggested Citation

  • Chris Downing & Steven A. Sharpe, 2003. "Getting bad news out early: does it really help stock prices?," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2003-58, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2003-58
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2003/200358/200358abs.html
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2003/200358/200358pap.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Skinner, Dj, 1994. "Why Firms Voluntarily Disclose Bad-News," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(1), pages 38-60.
    2. Hardle, Wolfgang & Linton, Oliver, 1986. "Applied nonparametric methods," Handbook of Econometrics, in: R. F. Engle & D. McFadden (ed.),Handbook of Econometrics, edition 1, volume 4, chapter 38, pages 2295-2339, Elsevier.
    3. Bartov, Eli & Givoly, Dan & Hayn, Carla, 2002. "The rewards to meeting or beating earnings expectations," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 33(2), pages 173-204, June.
    4. Cleveland, William S. & Devlin, Susan J. & Grosse, Eric, 1988. "Regression by local fitting : Methods, properties, and computational algorithms," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 37(1), pages 87-114, January.
    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. Vahid Biglari & Ervina Binti Alfan & Rubi Binti Ahmad & Najmeh Hajian, 2013. "The Ability of Analysts' Recommendations to Predict Optimistic and Pessimistic Forecasts," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(10), pages 1-10, October.
    2. Vahid Biglari Author_Email: vahidbiglari@siswa.um.edu.my & Gurcharan Singh Pritam Singh, 2011. "The Effect Of Market Incentives On Analyst Forecast Management And Analyst Forecast Error," 2nd International Conference on Business and Economic Research (2nd ICBER 2011) Proceeding 2011-215, Conference Master Resources.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Stock - Prices;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:fip:fedgfe:2003-58. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/frbgvus.html .

    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 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.