Fundamental Information Analysis
识别并检验了分析师认为对证券估值有用的财务变量，发现大多数变量能显著增加盈余对超额收益的解释力，且宏观经济条件会强化这种关系。
Fundamental analysis is aimed at determining the value of corporate securities by a careful examination of key value-drivers, such as earnings, risk, growth, and competitive position. In the context of such analysis, we identify below a set of financial variables (fundamentals) claimed by analysts to be useful in security valuation and examine these claims by estimating the incremental value-relevance of these variables over earnings. Our findings support the incremental value-relevance of most of the identified fundamentals; in fact, for the 1980s, the fundamentals add approximately 70%, on average, to the explanatory power of earnings with respect to excess returns. We also show that the returns-fundamentals relation is considerably strengthened when it is conditioned on macroeconomic variables, thereby demonstrating the importance of a contextual capital market analysis. For example, several fundamentals that appear only weakly value-relevant or even irrelevant in the unconditional analysis exhibit strong association with returns under specific economic conditions (e.g., the accounts receivable and the provision for doubtful receivables signals during high inflation). From a general examination of the role of fundamentals in security valuation we turn to the related issues of earnings persistence, growth, and the earnings response coefficient. We hypothesize that the funda-