Institutional Holdings and Trading Volume Reactions to Quarterly Earnings Announcements

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 immediately following an earnings announcement, after controlling for the magnitude of the associated price reaction and the dispersion of analysts' EPS forecasts. The results are robust to various measures of abnormal trading volume. Our findings suggest that newly released information does not necessarily have the same value to heterogeneous investor types and support Lev's (1988) emphasis on the importance of focusing on investor classes.