Recently there is growing interest in emerging capital markets such as Athens Stock
Exchange (ASE). The paper investigates the predictive content of semi-annually published
earnings for the listed companies in the ASE over the period 1988-1997.
By observing correlation matrices between semi-annual and annual earnings we are
concerned to see if any regularities can be discovered. The degree of deviation between them
is measured by calculating changes of semi-annual and yearly earnings. Different forecast errors
measures such as the Mean Absolute Error, the Mean Square Error and the Average Error
are used to provide evidence of the disparities of the forecast errors.
The results, indicate that interim reports as currently prepared cannot predict accurately
the annual earnings. Since the introduction of the measures the predictive power of semi-annual
reports has been improved only marginally.
(EN)
Social Sciences ▶ Economics and Business Finance
(EN)
University of Peiraeus
