Banca de DEFESA: LAVÍNIA SOUSA GORDINHO

RELEVANCE OF THE INFORMATIONAL CONTENT OF FINANCIAL STATEMENTS FOR PREDICTING FUTURE RETURNS ON SHARE: EVIDENCE ON NET OPERATING ASSETS (NOA)

Net Operating Assets. NOA anomaly. Future Stock Returns. Behavioral Finance Theory. Limited Attention

The objective of this study was to investigate the significance of the informational content of financial statements by analyzing the predictive ability of Net Operating Assets (NOA) in anticipating a strong negative relationship with future stock returns in the Brazilian market. The research integrated the lines of Behavioral Accounting and Value-Relevance in order to explore both the emotional and cognitive dimensions of interpretations of financial accounting information, as well as the impact of these on investors' market diagnoses and projections, providing a more accurate view of the interaction between human behavior, accounting information, and perceived value. To achieve this objective, the most recent protocol for studying the predictability of future stock returns through the NOA anomaly by Papanastasopoulos and Thomakos (2017) was utilized, fundamentally documented by Hirshleifer et al. (2004) and further developed by Papanastasopoulos, Thomakos, and Wang (2011) in North American and European contexts, where they found that NOAs are strong and negative predictors of future stock returns. In this study, within the Brazilian context, the results supported the aforementioned findings by indicating that NOAs are also strong negative predictors of future returns due to the statistical significance of the coefficient associated with this explanatory variable of interest in the sample and model used in this research