We define a delayed disclosure ratio (DD) as the fraction of 10-Q financial statement items that are withheld at the earlier quarterly earnings announcement. We find that higher DD firms have a greater delay in investor and analyst response to earnings surprises: (i) the fraction of total market...

We find that lower ex-ante earnings volatility leads to higher Post-Earnings Announcement Drift (PEAD). PEAD is a function of both the magnitude of an earnings surprise and its persistence. While prior research has largely investigated market reactions to the magnitude of the earnings surprise,...

Psychological evidence indicates that it is hard to process multiple stimuli and perform multiple tasks at the same time. This paper tests the investor distraction hypothesis, which holds that the arrival of extraneous news causes trading and market prices to react sluggishly to relevant news...

There is reliable evidence that managers smooth their reported earnings. If some firms manage earnings downwards (upwards) when they experience large positive (negative) earnings shocks and if investors have cognitive limits or are inattentive, then it is plausible that the post-earnings...

We propose the visual attention hypothesis, that visuals in firm earnings announcements increase attention to the earnings news. We find that visuals in firm Twitter earnings announcements are associated with more retweets, consistent with greater follower engagement with announcements with...

This study examines the role of expectations management in explaining why firms with high dispersion in analyst forecasts experience relatively low future stock returns. We first demonstrate that the negative relation between dispersion and returns is concentrated around earnings announcements...

We analyze management's emphasis (i.e., prominence, frequency, and textual highlighting) of GAAP metrics within the narrative portion of earnings announcement press releases; we assess whether management uses emphasis opportunistically, informatively, or both. We find that management emphasizes...

We model limited attention as incomplete usage of publicly available information. Informed players decide whether or not to disclose to observers who sometimes neglect either disclosed signals or the implications of non-disclosure. In equilibrium observers are unrealistically optimistic,...

We investigate a pervasive voluntary disclosure practice -- managers including balance sheets with quarterly earnings announcements. Consistent with expectations, we find that managers voluntarily disclose balance sheets when current earnings are relatively less informative, or when future...

This paper uses a unique transaction-level fund trading dataset to evaluate institutional investors' trading performance. Our research design follows a two-step procedure. In the first stage, we identify funds that heavily sold shares in firms before their public revelation of stock option...