IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/empfin/v16y2009i1p70-86.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Negative earnings, positive earnings and stock return predictability: An empirical examination of market timing

Author

Listed:
  • Barnhart, Scott W.
  • Giannetti, Antoine

Abstract

We examine the predictive ability of earnings-price ratios or yields for the S&P 500 index. We decompose the aggregate earnings-price ratio into its positive and negative components ("winners" vs "losers") and find that the negative component has the most predictive ability. We also find that the earnings-price measures forecast both future returns and earnings growth. Our models display substantial variation in explanatory power over time with forecast power resurfacing in the latter 1990s. We conclude that to the extent that earnings-price yields predict future S&P 500 returns, the negative earnings component is the driving factor.

Suggested Citation

  • Barnhart, Scott W. & Giannetti, Antoine, 2009. "Negative earnings, positive earnings and stock return predictability: An empirical examination of market timing," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 70-86, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:empfin:v:16:y:2009:i:1:p:70-86
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927-5398(08)00031-5
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. repec:bla:jfinan:v:53:y:1998:i:5:p:1563-1587 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. John Y. Campbell & Pierre Perron, 1991. "Pitfalls and Opportunities: What Macroeconomists Should Know about Unit Roots," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1991, Volume 6, pages 141-220, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Marquering, Wessel & Verbeek, Marno, 2004. "The Economic Value of Predicting Stock Index Returns and Volatility," Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 39(2), pages 407-429, June.
    4. Cumby, Robert E. & Modest, David M., 1987. "Testing for market timing ability : A framework for forecast evaluation," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(1), pages 169-189, September.
    5. Henriksson, Roy D & Merton, Robert C, 1981. "On Market Timing and Investment Performance. II. Statistical Procedures for Evaluating Forecasting Skills," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 54(4), pages 513-533, October.
    6. Martin Lettau & Sydney Ludvigson, 2001. "Consumption, Aggregate Wealth, and Expected Stock Returns," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(3), pages 815-849, June.
    7. Harvey, David I & Leybourne, Stephen J & Newbold, Paul, 1998. "Tests for Forecast Encompassing," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 16(2), pages 254-259, April.
    8. Degeorge, Francois & Patel, Jayendu & Zeckhauser, Richard, 1999. "Earnings Management to Exceed Thresholds," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 72(1), pages 1-33, January.
    9. De Bondt, Werner F M & Thaler, Richard, 1985. "Does the Stock Market Overreact?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 40(3), pages 793-805, July.
    10. Torben G. Andersen & Tim Bollerslev & Francis X. Diebold & Clara Vega, 2003. "Micro Effects of Macro Announcements: Real-Time Price Discovery in Foreign Exchange," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 93(1), pages 38-62, March.
    11. Campbell, John Y, 1991. "A Variance Decomposition for Stock Returns," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 101(405), pages 157-179, March.
    12. Peter F. Christoffersen & Francis X. Diebold, 2006. "Financial Asset Returns, Direction-of-Change Forecasting, and Volatility Dynamics," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 52(8), pages 1273-1287, August.
    13. Pesaran, M Hashem & Timmermann, Allan, 1995. "Predictability of Stock Returns: Robustness and Economic Significance," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 50(4), pages 1201-1228, September.
    14. Amit Goyal & Ivo Welch, 2003. "Predicting the Equity Premium with Dividend Ratios," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 49(5), pages 639-654, May.
    15. Pesaran, M. Hashem & Timmermann, Allan, 2002. "Market timing and return prediction under model instability," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 9(5), pages 495-510, December.
    16. Newey, Whitney & West, Kenneth, 2014. "A simple, positive semi-definite, heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent covariance matrix," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 33(1), pages 125-132.
    17. John Y. Campbell, Robert J. Shiller, 1988. "The Dividend-Price Ratio and Expectations of Future Dividends and Discount Factors," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 1(3), pages 195-228.
    18. Jeff Fleming & Chris Kirby & Barbara Ostdiek, 2001. "The Economic Value of Volatility Timing," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 56(1), pages 329-352, February.
    19. Campbell, John Y. & Yogo, Motohiro, 2006. "Efficient tests of stock return predictability," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 81(1), pages 27-60, July.
    20. repec:bla:jfinan:v:44:y:1989:i:5:p:1177-89 is not listed on IDEAS
    21. Sims, Christopher A, 1980. "Macroeconomics and Reality," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 48(1), pages 1-48, January.
    22. French, Kenneth R. & Schwert, G. William & Stambaugh, Robert F., 1987. "Expected stock returns and volatility," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 19(1), pages 3-29, September.
    23. Lewellen, Jonathan, 2004. "Predicting returns with financial ratios," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(2), pages 209-235, November.
    24. Bossaerts, Peter & Hillion, Pierre, 1999. "Implementing Statistical Criteria to Select Return Forecasting Models: What Do We Learn?," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 12(2), pages 405-428.
    25. Jennifer Conrad & Bradford Cornell & Wayne R. Landsman, 2002. "When Is Bad News Really Bad News?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 57(6), pages 2507-2532, December.
    26. Stambaugh, Robert F., 1999. "Predictive regressions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 54(3), pages 375-421, December.
    27. Sims, Christopher A & Stock, James H & Watson, Mark W, 1990. "Inference in Linear Time Series Models with Some Unit Roots," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 58(1), pages 113-144, January.
    28. Kothari, S. P. & Zimmerman, Jerold L., 1995. "Price and return models," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 20(2), pages 155-192, September.
    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. Gonçalves, Rui & Ferreira, Helena & Stollenwerk, Nico & Pinto, Alberto Adrego, 2010. "Universal fluctuations of the AEX index," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 389(21), pages 4776-4784.
    2. Dror Parnes, 2010. "The information content of analysts reports and bankruptcy risk measures," Applied Financial Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(19), pages 1499-1513.
    3. Rui Gonc{c}alves & Helena Ferreira & Alberto Pinto, 2010. "Universality in DAX index returns fluctuations," Papers 1004.1136, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2010.

    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. Rapach, David & Zhou, Guofu, 2013. "Forecasting Stock Returns," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 328-383, Elsevier.
    2. Paye, Bradley S. & Timmermann, Allan, 2006. "Instability of return prediction models," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 13(3), pages 274-315, June.
    3. Lettau, Martin & Ludvigson, Sydney C., 2005. "Expected returns and expected dividend growth," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 76(3), pages 583-626, June.
    4. Chen, Long, 2009. "On the reversal of return and dividend growth predictability: A tale of two periods," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(1), pages 128-151, April.
    5. Rapach, David E. & Wohar, Mark E., 2006. "In-sample vs. out-of-sample tests of stock return predictability in the context of data mining," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 13(2), pages 231-247, March.
    6. Narayan, Seema & Smyth, Russell, 2015. "The financial econometrics of price discovery and predictability," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 380-393.
    7. Neil Kellard & John Nankervis & Fotis Papadimitriou, 2007. "Predicting the UK Equity Premium with Dividend Ratios: An Out-Of-Sample Recursive Residuals Graphical Approach," Money Macro and Finance (MMF) Research Group Conference 2006 129, Money Macro and Finance Research Group.
    8. Schrimpf, Andreas, 2010. "International stock return predictability under model uncertainty," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 29(7), pages 1256-1282, November.
    9. Maio, Paulo, 2016. "Cross-sectional return dispersion and the equity premium," Journal of Financial Markets, Elsevier, vol. 29(C), pages 87-109.
    10. John Powell & Jing Shi & Tom Smith & Robert Whaley, 2009. "Common Divisors, Payout Persistence, and Return Predictability," International Review of Finance, International Review of Finance Ltd., vol. 9(4), pages 335-357, December.
    11. Boudoukh, Jacob & Israel, Ronen & Richardson, Matthew, 2022. "Biases in long-horizon predictive regressions," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 145(3), pages 937-969.
    12. Çakmaklı, Cem & van Dijk, Dick, 2016. "Getting the most out of macroeconomic information for predicting excess stock returns," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 650-668.
    13. Puneet Handa, 2006. "Does Stock Return Predictability Imply Improved Asset Allocation and Performance? Evidence from the U.S. Stock Market (1954–2002)," The Journal of Business, University of Chicago Press, vol. 79(5), pages 2423-2468, September.
    14. Stephan Jank, 2015. "Changes in the Composition of Publicly Traded Firms: Implications for the Dividend-Price Ratio and Return Predictability," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 61(6), pages 1362-1377, June.
    15. Cem Cakmakli & Dick van Dijk, 2010. "Getting the Most out of Macroeconomic Information for Predicting Stock Returns and Volatility," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 10-115/4, Tinbergen Institute.
    16. Wayne E. Ferson & Sergei Sarkissian & Timothy T. Simin, 2003. "Spurious Regressions in Financial Economics?," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 58(4), pages 1393-1413, August.
    17. Helmut Herwartz & Leonardo Morales-Arias, 2009. "In-sample and out-of-sample properties of international stock return dynamics conditional on equilibrium pricing factors," The European Journal of Finance, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 15(1), pages 1-28.
    18. Stanislav Anatolyev & Nikolay Gospodinov, 2007. "Modeling Financial Return Dynamics by Decomposition," Working Papers w0095, New Economic School (NES).
    19. John Y. Campbell, 2008. "Viewpoint: Estimating the equity premium," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 41(1), pages 1-21, February.
    20. Tim Bollerslev & George Tauchen & Hao Zhou, 2009. "Expected Stock Returns and Variance Risk Premia," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 22(11), pages 4463-4492, November.

    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:eee:empfin:v:16:y:2009:i:1:p:70-86. 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jempfin .

    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.