Estimating Price Delays on Tehran Stock Exchange

In an efficient market, prices should reflect all information available to investors. In reality, several frictions can prevent prices from incorporating the information immediately after disclosure. This can cause delays in the incorporation of information into prices and increase the premium investors require for investing in stocks. Using an empirical measure of price delays, we examine the effect of these frictions and the resulting price delays on the cross-section of expected returns on Tehran Stock Exchange. The delay measure is defined as a function of contemporaneous and lagged systematic information that is impounded into prices. If frictions prevent information from impacting prices contemporaneously, lagged information should have explanatory power for stock returns. We find that stocks with higher price delays tend to have a premium that is not explained by known risk factors of market risk, size, value, momentum and liquidity. Our results are robust to a number of empirical specifications, namely the zero-investment portfolio returns and Fama-Macbeth regressions