Robust measures of earnings surprises

Event studies of market efficiency measure an earnings surprise with the consensuserror (CE), defined as earnings minus the average of professional forecasts. Even if asubset of forecasts can be biased, the ideal but difficult to estimate parameter-dependentalternative to CE is a nonlinear filter of...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: CHIANG, Chin-Han, DAI, Wei, FAN, Jianqing, HONG, Harrison, Jun TU
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2019
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/5406
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/lkcsb_research/article/6405/viewcontent/SSRN_id2473366.pdf
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Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Event studies of market efficiency measure an earnings surprise with the consensuserror (CE), defined as earnings minus the average of professional forecasts. Even if asubset of forecasts can be biased, the ideal but difficult to estimate parameter-dependentalternative to CE is a nonlinear filter of individual errors that adjusts for bias. We showthat CE is a poor parameter-free approximation for this ideal measure. The fractionof misses on the same side (FOM), by discarding the magnitude of misses, offers a farbetterapproximation. FOM performs particularly well against CE in predicting thereturns of US stocks, where bias is potentially large, than that of international stocks.