This paper empirically examines the incremental relation between trading volume surrounding quarterly earnings announcements and institutional holdings. Consistent with Cready (1988) and Lee (1992), we find a significant positive relation between abnormal trading volume and the fraction of institutional ownership during the period immediatly following an earnings announcement, after controlling for the magnitude of the associated price reaction and the dispersion of analysts' EPS forecasts.

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Investment and Finance, grade: 1.1, EBS European Business School gGmbH (Finance), language: English, abstract: Many authors have already studied about stock price reactions after earnings announcements yet, which is because of the importance of earnings announcements, in particular quarterly earnings announcements, for many investors. However, all major studies concerning this topic deal with long-term scenarios, the stock's price performance is measured for a time period of at least three quarters. Due to the fact that there are many investors, especially institutional investors such as hedge funds that trade stocks much more frequently, the existing studies are not relevant for them. This paper studies stock price reactions around quarterly earnings announcements for companies listed in Deutscher Aktienindex (DAX) or Midcap DAX (MDAX) with respect to changes of the company's full-year outlook and of earnings surprise regarding analyst consensus forecast within ten days before and after the announcement date. Hence, this paper aims to analyse short-term reaction to quarterly earnings announcements, which are of relevance for all investors, whose investment strategy is, at least partially, focussing on the short-term performance. The main target group of this analysis are therefore hedge funds and investors that run short-term strategies. Due to the fact that the widespread Event Study Methodology is focused on the long-term, it is irrelevant for this analysis.

This study tests whether the observed patterns in stock returns after quarterly earnings announcements are related to the proportion of firm shares held by institutional investors, a variable used by prior research to proxy for investor sophistication. Our findings show that the institutional holdings variable is negatively correlated with the observed post-announcement abnormal returns. Our findings also show that traditional proxies for transaction costs (i.e., trading volume, stock price) as well as firm size have little incremental power to explain post announcement abnormal returns when institutional holdings is an explanatory variable. If institutional ownership is a valid proxy for investor sophistication, these findings suggest that the trading activity of unsophisticated investors underlies the predictability of stock returns after earnings announcements. However, tests evaluating the validity of institutional holdings as a proxy for investor sophistication yield only mixed results. This calls for caution in interpreting our findings.

"Managers have substantial discretion in when to announce earnings during the day. While the prior literature has shown that the timing of announcements during the day can affect the stock market's reaction to earnings news, there is either mixed or weak empirical evidence on why a manager chooses a certain time of the day to announce earnings. In this paper, I examine whether institutional ownership affects firms' decisions to announce earnings after hours (AH). AH are largely dominated by institutional investors who better understand the implications of earnings news for firm value and stock prices. I argue that firms with greater institutional ownership announce earnings AH to promote institutional investors' trading, and therefore facilitate post-announcement price discovery and reduce price volatility. Using the annual reconstitution of the Russell 1000 and 2000 indexes which provides plausibly exogenous variation in institutional ownership, I find that firms with higher institutional ownership are more likely to announce earnings during an aftermarket session (i.e., AH after the market closes), but not during a premarket session (i.e., AH before the market opens). My analysis further shows that transient institutional ownership has a stronger influence on the likelihood of after-market announcements relative to quasi-indexer and dedicated institutional holdings, and that the effect of institutional ownership on the announcement timing is more pronounced when firms have bad earnings news or large transitory earnings components. Lastly, I find that announcing earnings during an after-market session indeed facilitates the post-announcement price discovery and reduces price volatility for firms with greater institutional ownership. Collectively, my findings suggest that institutional ownership influences firms' earnings announcement timing decisions"--Pages vii-viii.