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We use posts on the investor-focused StockTwits social media network to generate new insights regarding investor disagreement, disclosure processing costs, and trading volume around earnings announcements. Using social media-based measures of disagreement, we find that both preannouncement disagreement and increases in disagreement around an earnings announcement are positively associated with trading volume. Drawing upon the disclosure processing costs literature, we provide evidence that the effects of disagreement increase when disclosure processing costs are lower. Our social media measures of disagreement remain significant after including traditional analyst earnings estimate measures of disagreement in the model. Our study provides new evidence on the importance of disclosure processing costs and is consistent with lower disclosure processing costs amplifying both the resolution of preannouncement disagreement and new disagreement about earnings information. Data Availability: All data are available from the sources described in the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the disclosure of non-GAAP earnings information in quarters containing transitory gains to investigate whether the primary motivation for these managers to disclose non-GAAP earnings is to inform or mislead. In this setting, non-GAAP earnings are more informative than GAAP earnings, even though they are lower than GAAP earnings. Thus, managers motivated to inform stakeholders about sustainable earnings will disclose non-GAAP earnings information excluding the gain, whereas managers motivated to report higher earnings will obscure the transitory nature of the gain by focusing on GAAP earnings. We find evidence that managers' disclosure choices vary widely across firms, and these choices affect investors' perceptions of core operating earnings. We then contrast how the same firm discloses non-GAAP earnings in the presence of transitory losses to provide additional evidence on the motives of individual firms' disclosures. We conclude that the most pervasive motivation to disclose non-GAAP earnings in the presence of transitory gains is to inform. An economically significant proportion of firms, however, appear opportunistic in that they only disclose non-GAAP earnings information when it increases investors' perceptions of core operating earnings. Our evidence is important because we speak to the influence that each motive has on the choice to disclose non-GAAP earnings and we provide evidence on the underlying motives behind specific firms' disclosures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I investigate the possibility that recent price movements include significantly larger speculative components than those observed historically, where speculation is defined as the component of price that does not co-move with fundamentals. Specifically, at the aggregate level, price and accounting fundamentals co-move historically (1979-1993) but do not co-move recently (1994-2008). The lack of co-movement in recent periods is accompanied by a significant reduction in the positive association between ratios of accounting fundamentals-to-price with future market returns. Changes in measurement error in accounting fundamentals do not appear to cause the lack of co-movement in recent periods, and risk- and growth-based explanations are not supported by the data. The results of this study provide evidence of a structural change in the long-run association between price and accounting fundamentals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]