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...

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...

Over the past 12 years, financial analysts across the world have been optimistically wrong with their 12-month earnings forecasts by 25.3%. This study may be the first of its kind to assess analyst earnings forecast accuracy at all listed companies across the globe, covering 70 countries. A...

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...

Employing a panel dataset of Vietnamese non-financial listed firms, we find that firms with greater foreign shareholdings are aligned with higher quality of financial disclosure. More specially, we find that greater foreign shareholdings are associated with (i) lower earnings management; (ii)...

This study examines whether a regulation on mandatory disclosure of earnings forecasts encourages managers to issue more optimistic earnings forecasts, and whether the optimistic forecasts are revised downward or the reported earnings are managed upward using discretionary accruals to reduce the...

This study investigates whether opportunistic earnings management affects the value relevance of net income and book value in determining stock price. We document a decrease in the value relevance of earnings in the year of an equity offering for a group of firms that exhibit ex post evidence of...

Citing fear of legal liability as a partial explanation, prior research documents (1) managers' reluctance to voluntarily disclose management earnings forecasts, and (2) higher forecast disclosure frequencies in periods of bad news. We provide evidence on how management earnings forecast...

This paper provides evidence on the characteristics of firms that include pro forma earnings information in their press releases and on whether the usefulness of pro forma earnings to investors varies systematically with these characteristics. Using a sample of 249 press releases from 1997-99,...

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...