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The main purpose of this study is to investigate the role of accounting comparability as an intra-organizational factor on pricing considerations of information environment issues such as information uncertainty and information asymmetry. In this study, two criteria have been used to measure information uncertainty. Based on the standard deviation of cash flows by the matched company (MF) method, the first criterion of information uncertainty on the model presented by Larson and Risatek is based. To measure the second criterion three different indicators were used, and then factor analysis method was used to convert these indicators into a single criterion. Information asymmetry is also measured based on the two indicators of accruals quality and sales gap. Also, the expected return of shareholders has been calculated based on the 5-factor model of Fama and French, for pricing these issues. For this purpose, data related to companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange have been extracted, for the period 1388 to 1397 and a combined regression model has been used to test the research hypotheses. The results show that the comparability of profits and cash flows leads to changes in returns due to information uncertainty and information asymmetry.Thus, investors and users of financial information in the Iranian capital market as well as standard formulators should pay special attention to the importance of comparability of financial reports as a qualitative factor among organizations; this is because it reduces the effects of information environment interference on the decision-making of users of financial information.

Stakeholders' uncertainty about firms' value drives their urge to get information, as well as managerial disclosure choices. In this study, the authors examine whether and how an important source of uncertainty – the recent COVID-19 pandemic's effect on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure – is beyond managerial and stakeholders' control. The authors develop a novel construct for daily CSR disclosure by employing computer-aided text analysis (CATA) on the press releases issued by 125 New Zealand Stock Exchange (NZX) listed from 28 February 2020 to 31 December 2020. To capture COVID-19 intensity, the authors use the growth rate of the population-adjusted cumulative sum of confirmed cases in New Zealand on a specific day. To examine the association between the COVID-19 outbreak and companies' CSR disclosure, the authors employed ordinary least squares (OLS) regression by clustering standard error at the firm level. The authors find a one standard deviation increase in the COVID-19 outbreak leads to a 28% increase in such disclosures. These results remained robust to a series of sensitivity tests and continue to hold after accounting for potential endogeneity concerns. In the channel analysis, the study demonstrates that the positive relationship between COVID-19 and CSR disclosure is more pronounced in the presence of a well-structured board (i.e. a large, more independent board and with a higher proportion of women on it). In further analysis, the authors find the documented relationship varies over the pandemic's life cycle and is moderated by government stringency response, peer CSR pressure and media coverage. This paper is the first study that contributes to the scant literature examining the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on CSR disclosure. Prior research either investigates the relationship of the CSR-stock return during the COVID-19 market crisis or examines the relationship between corporate characteristics including the quality of financial information and the reactions of stock returns during COVID-19. The authors extend such studies by providing empirical evidence that managers respond to COVID-19 by increasing CSR disclosure.

After the development of behavioral financial theory, the experimental literature in this domain has been exclusively oriented toward investigating the relationship between investors’ inclinations and variations of stocks' price. There hasn’t been any independent research on investigating factors contributing to behavioral mistakes of investors and how they can be moderated. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of accounting information quality and information uncertainty on investor sentiment. To achieve this goal, the data of 560 companies during the financial periods from 2009 to 2016 is used. The results of this study showed that accounting information quality and lack of confidence in information have a significant negative and significant positive relationship with investors’ inclinations. Furthermore, the results showed that increase in the quality of accounting information and reduction of confidence in information does reduce investors’ affective behavior in racing stocks. In addition, the results of analyses showed that investors are inclined more toward more optimistic predictions for stock price with lower information quality and confidence when investors are more optimistic.

The purpose of this study is investigating the role of accounting information uncertainty on investors’ reaction to earnings announcement, as well as investors’ reaction to good earnings news. For doing so, a sample of 162 listed companies in the Tehran Stock Exchange in the period 1384 to 1394 have been selected. Three criteria including information quality, cash flows’ uncertainty (traditional and matched- firm method) were used for calculating the information uncertainty. The results of hypotheses test indicated when there is high information uncertainty (compared to low uncertainty), investors’ reaction to earnings announcement is less. Also, under high uncertainty, investors display less reaction to good news that this response is consistent with the conservatism approach.

Behavioural finance models suggest that under uncertainty, investors overweight their private information and overreact to it. We test this theoretical prediction in an M&A framework. We find that under high information uncertainty, when investors are more likely to possess firm-specific information, acquiring firms generate highly positive and significant gains following the announcement of private stock and private cash acquisitions (positive news) while the market heavily punishes public stock (negative news) deals. On the other hand, under conditions of low information uncertainty, when investors do not possess private information, the market reaction is complete (i.e. zero abnormal returns) irrespective of the type of acquisition. Overall, we provide empirical evidence that shows that information uncertainty plays a significant role in explaining short-run acquirer abnormal returns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information uncertainty has been an old topic in finance literature. Information uncertainty means ambiguity about a firm’s fundamental value, which may arise from two conventional sources: 1) characteristics of the business or industry, and 2) the company’s disclosure policy. The first source related to growth options and second source related to information asymmetry. From investors’ perspective the mechanisms and outcomes of every source are quite different. In this research we use from earning forecast dispersion as a proxy for measuring information uncertainty. We use stock turnover and price impact as proxies for information asymmetry. To control firm’s growth options, we use firm age, market-to-book ratio, and capital expenditure over total assets and Tobin’s Q. We use panel data regression model to analyze information. Our results indicate that information uncertainty has a positive relationship with information asymmetry and growth options.

This study investigated the effect of income smoothing on information uncertainty, stock return and cost of equity. For income smoothing two indices are used: total accruals smoothing and discretionary accruals smoothing. With accurate study of literature we hypothesized three possibilities and selected 111 companies listed in Tehran stock exchange as our survey for a period of three years, 1385-1387. In this study, Ohlson and Juttner- Narouth models were used to collect data. Our hypotheses were analyzed using multiple liner regressions and F and T tests. Our results showed that income smoothing caused reduction in information uncertainty in selected companies. It also showed that when fluctuations related to unexpected stock earnings are controlled, income smoothing 5 days before and after earnings announcement has no effect on companies' stock return. Finally our data showed that income smoothing has no effect on cost of equity.

In this study, we examine some of the consequences of asset securitization. Specifically, using a sample of bank holding companies, we investigate whether the difficulty in assessing the true extent of risk transfer, between securitizing banks and investors in asset-backed securities, affects bank information uncertainty. We find that when market participants have a greater difficulty in estimating risk transfer, banks face greater information uncertainty (i.e., larger bid-ask spreads and analyst forecast dispersion). In addition, we find that this effect is mitigated for banks that operate in a higher quality information environment. We also find that banks that securitize financial assets have higher spreads and analyst forecast dispersion as compared to non-securitizing banks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]