An Evaluation of Earnings Announcements’ Timing and Consistency with Subsequent Financial Statements

We utilize Compustat quarterly data and earnings announcement dates to study how the time from the end of firms' quarters to the announcement of the firm's earnings has varied, on average, during 2005-2015. In addition, we study how the advent of XBRL may have affected the timeliness of firms' earnings announcements during the post-XBRL era (2012-2015) as compared to the per-XBRL era (2005-2008). In addition, we manually collect data from 2015 first, second, and third quarter 8-K earnings announcements and subsequent 10-Q quarterly financial statements filed on the SEC website. We then compare the data reported in the 8-K earnings announcements to the data reported in the subsequent 10-Q financial statements to assess the consistence between earnings announcements data and the corresponding financial statement data