Literature review
The concept of stock prices originated from Random Walk theory in the work of Fama (1980). The early studies by Fama (1965), Samuelson (1965) and Working (1960) could not reject a random walk theory. Shiller (2000) indicates that there are reasons that the random walk behavior of stock prices should hold. There is evidence suggesting that stock prices do follow a random walk.
Findings by Shiller (2000) support that stock prices are very much uncertain and this may not be true because firms fundamentals may to a great extent influence stock prices. This argument is supported by early rejection of a random walk theory by Hoffer and Osborne (1966) and Porterba and Summer (2000) who argue that there is little theoretical basis for strong attachment to the null hypothesis that stock prices follow a random walk.
Stock prices could be determined by micro and macro economic factors (Christopher, Rufus and Jimoh, 2009). These factors which include book value of the firm, dividend per share, EPS, price- earning ratio and dividend cover (Gompers, Ishii and Metrick, 2003). Moore and Beltz (2002) argue that stock prices of a firm is influenced by firm beta ratios i.e. its market value to book value. Hordahl and Packer (2006) challenge Moore and Belt (2002) position. They argue that stochastic discount factor and future pay offs determine the stock prices. Corwins (2003) identifies uncertainty and asymmetric information as a strong influence of firms stock pricing which led to under price.
The relationship between stock prices and firm EPS has received considerable attention in the literature. One of these studies is the one conducted by Lev (2001) who review several studies on the information content of firm EPS and reports that EPS changes only on weekly related to contemporaneous stock prices. Shiller (2000), Fama and French (2002) use regression of stock prices on the lagged firm EPS and find that they have explanatory power to stock prices movement. In the same vain, Ball and Brown (2001) conducted a study to investigate the annual association between annual change in stock prices and annual changes in firms EPS. The result obtained shows that annual changes in stock prices cause firm EPS to change in the following year. Chang and Wang (2008) conducted a study using Ohlson (1995) model on Taiwan firms in 2004. The result indicates that firm’s stock prices movement has a positive significant relationship with firm EPS.
Shiller (2000) argues that stock prices can be viewed as a predictions of investors earnings, therefore, it is reasonable that the variation in prices should be no greater than variation in firm EPS. Sheller’s findings have been investigated thoroughly and reach no agreement on the results. One important study of the relationship between stock prices and firm EPS is the work of Docking and Koch (2005) who assert that there is direct relationship between firm EPS announcement and stock price behavior. In the same vein, Chetty, Rosenberg and Saez (2007) explain that stock prices changes behavior when firms EPS are announced.
Zhao (2000) studies the relationship between stock prices and firm EPS using regression model. He found that firm EPS have an important impact on stock prices, especially on long horizons, but the hypothesis that move one-for-one with ex-ante is rejected. In broader perspective Lee (2002) uses three-years rolling regressions to analyze the relationship between