A new approach to studying earnings announcement timing : why do firms change earnings announcement dates?

Abstract

This study provides evidence on firms' incentives to strategically time their earnings announcements. I propose and implement a novel approach to isolating the impact of the relative ordering of different firms' earnings announcements on market outcomes. This approach relies on quasi-exogenous variation in the relative timing of earnings announcements driven by the specific day-of-week on which a calendar month begins. I refer to the resulting variation in firms' relative timing as 'calendar rotations,' which are uncorrelated with various earnings- and market-based proxies for the news content of firms' announcements. I show firms whose earnings announcements are moved forward due to calendar rotations receive greater media coverage of earnings news, experience less preemption of earnings news, and display larger earnings response coefficient (ERC). Together, these results suggest one reason why managers accelerate good-news announcements and delay bad-news announcements is that doing so influences the extent of media exposure and the speed of stock price discovery to their advantage.