Is the Market Over-Optimistic about the Prospects of Firms that Issue Equity? Evidence for the Spanish Market

Abstract

Previous evidence has documented that equity issuers underperform in the long-run. One possible explanation is that investors have overoptimistic expectations regarding future earnings and the underperformance occurs as these expectations are corrected over time. Our central focus is to test this hypothesis for Spanish rights issuing firms, for that, firstly we examine analysts' predictions about future earnings of these companies. We observe that forecasts are unusually favourable and, moreover, the post-offering underperformance is most pronounced when analyst predictions have higher optimistic bias. Secondly, we study the market response to issuing firms' earnings announcements in the post-offering period observing a significant negative reaction. So the evidence in this paper is consistent with the excessive optimism hypothesis about issuing firms.