We consider measures of stock-picking skill of mutual fund managers based on the earnings announcement returns of the stocks that they hold and trade. Relative to standard approaches, this approach focuses on an especially informative subset of the returns data, potentially increasing power to...

We test whether fund managers have stock-picking skill by comparing their holdings and trades prior to earnings announcements with the returns realized at those events. This approach largely avoids the joint-hypothesis problem with long-horizon studies of fund performance. Consistent with...