The Timing of Corporate Earnings Announcements

Abstract

Beginning with Patell and Wolfson (1982), several papers have documented that earnings announcements made on weeks’ last day tend to contain worse earnings news than those made at other week days. One hypothesis is that opportunistic managers release earnings at times of decreased media attention to hide their bad news and reduce the associated market penalty. Using firm-level tests that focus on those firms that switch their disclosure timing to weeks’ last day (rather than reporting at other week days), we find no evidence that managers in Tehran Stock Exchange opportunistically report worse news on weeks’ last day, using data from 4000 disclosure timing in 2001 to 2009. We, then, examined other determinants of timing decision (including percentage of free and floating stocks, complexity and size of firm and industry membership as explanatory variables for timing decision), using a logistic regression model. The results showed that only the percentage of free and floating stocks have effects on timig decision.

Keywords

• earnings surprises
• good news
• bad news
• strategic disclosure hypothesis
• earnings announcement