MARKET REACTION TO ANNUAL EARNINGS INNOVATIONS AND ALTERNATIVE TIME-SERIES ASSUMPTIONS: EVIDENCE OF THE BRAZILIAN MARKET

Abstract

This paper analyses the market reaction to earnings innovations under a high interest rate condition and different time-series assumptions for reported earnings. The sample consists of 176 Brazilian listed firms from 1995 to 2013 and the empirical analysis compare different assumptions of earnings persistence. The results show that high levels of interest rates and transitory components in earnings significantly reduce the forward-looking usefulness of accounting information and that different ARIMA assumptions lead to different the cross-sectional classification of firms in high and low earnings persistence. Additionally, the results show that market agents react more to earnings that exhibit high time-series persistence and that low-order ARIMA models work at least as well as high-order models in representing the time-series process of earnings in the earnings-returns association.

Keywords

• earnings usefulness
• earnings response coefficient
• earnings persistence