| The efficient capital markets hypothesis(EMH),as one of the most important theories in traditional finance,believes that the price of securities reflects all information in the capital markets,and the fluctuation of securities prices is an effective feedback to its fundamentals.Good or bad news.This theory holds that once the stock price deviates from its intrinsic value,rational investors will carry out arbitrage,and eventually make the price return to its intrinsic value in a short period of time.However,in the real stock market,speculation caused by information asymmetry and investors’ limited rationality abound.In view of this,behavioral finance theory developed vigorously at the end of the 1990 s.The theory broke the assumption that investors are completely rational and began to focus on people’s psychological condition,personality,bounded rationality,etc.,in which investors’ attention issues have become an important research direction.The cognitive resources theory proposed by Kahneman(1973)believes that people’s attention is limited.With the popularization of the Internet and the explosive increase of information,investors can only devote their limited attention quota to those information that can attract attention,and reflect it on stock prices through investment behavior.The comparability of accounting information,as one of the important characteristics of the quality of accounting information,plays an important role in alleviating information asymmetry,broadening information collection channels,and reducing the difficulty of information understanding.If the accounting information of each company is more comparable,then it is easier for investors to obtain the company’s accounting information,and it is easier to make an accurate understanding of the obtained accounting information,thus reducing the cost of information collection for investors,attracting the attention of investors,and reducing the distortion of information caused by difficulties in understanding.Compared with the stock markets of western developed countries,the high proportion of retail player investors,irregular information disclosure,and poor information quality are places that my country’s stock market needs to be improved.Due to the lack of professional knowledge,investment literacy,and difficulties in information acquisition,retail player investors have more prominent problems of limited attention,and are more vulnerable to market speculation and speculative atmosphere and adopt irrational investment behaviors.The comparability of accounting information plays a positive role in reducing the cost of investor information search and the difficulty of information understanding.Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study the influence of investor attention on stock returns and the moderating effect of accounting information comparability.In order to further study the relationship between investors’ limited attention,comparability of accounting information and stock returns,this paper takes all class A share stocks listed on the main board stocks listed on the main board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange as samples,and the final sample interval is from 2017 to 2021,and selects its monthly data as sample data to conduct relevant empirical tests.The results of the study find that: the current investor attention has a significant positive correlation with the current stock monthly return;the lagging investor attention has a significant negative correlation with the current stock monthly return,and the degree of negative correlation decreases with the passage of time;accounting information comparability plays a significant moderating role in it,which significantly strengthens the positive impact of the current investor attention on the current stock return,weakens the lagging investor attention and weakens the current stock return.Negative impact.The above research results deeply explore the relationship between investors’ attention,the comparability of accounting information and stock returns,reveal the influence mechanism between the three,and improve the relevant research in the areas of investors’ attention,which has certain practical and theoretical significance.This article also puts the indicator of accounting information comparability in the perspective of investors’ attention.For the first time,accounting information comparability is used as a regulatory variable and found that it can play a positive role in curbing excessive stock price decline and promoting stock price rise.This also provides internal motivation for the majority of listed companies to strive to improve the comparability of their own accounting information. |
