Hypothesis 1: Firms with higher (lower) levels of earnings noncommonality are associated with lower (higher) levels of idiosyncratic return volatility Other results suggest the opposite elationship between idiosyncratic risk and earnings noncommonality. Brown and Kimbrough (2011) find that earnings noncommonality 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 noncommonality and idiosyncratic risk. In addition, higher earnings noncommonality 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 noncommonality and idiosyncratic volatility. These findings form the basis of our second competing hypothesis
Hypothesis 2: Firms with higher (lower) levels of earnings noncommonality are associated with higher (lower) levels of idiosyncratic return volatility. These conflicting views suggest a third possibility, that the relation between earnings noncommonality and idiosyncratic return volatility is not straightforward. For example, that the effect of earnings noncommonality and idiosyncratic return volatility may be nonlinear. An empirical investigation is therefore required to test the true nature of the relationship between earnings noncommonality and idiosyncratic volatility.