Hypothesis 1: Firms with higher (lower) levels of earnings non commonality are associated with lower (higher) levels of idiosyncratic return volatility Other results suggest the opposite elationship between idiosyncratic risk and earnings non commonality. Brown and Kimbrough (2011) find that earnings non commonality is positively associated with intangible asset intensity. Mazzucato and Tancioni (2008) establish that firms with the highest R&D intensity have the highest idiosyncratic risk. These findings suggest a positive relationship between earnings non commonality and idiosyncratic risk. In addition, higher earnings non commonality implies from an asymmetric viewpoint that less information is available to investors and consequently higher volatility may occur due to the market friction. This is another reason to expect a positive relationship between earnings non commonality and idiosyncratic volatility. These findings form the basis of our second competing hypothesis
Hypothesis 2: Firms with higher (lower) levels of earnings non commonality are associated with higher (lower) levels of idiosyncratic return volatility. These conflicting views suggest a third possibility, that the relation between earnings non commonality and idiosyncratic return volatility is not straightforward. For example, that the effect of earnings non commonality and idiosyncratic return volatility may be nonlinear. An empirical investigation is therefore required to test the true nature of the relationship between earnings non commonality and idiosyncratic volatility.