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SYNOPSIS: Timely disclosure of financial statement information is a critical requirement for firms and wellfunctioning capital markets. Yet, every quarter or year, a non-trivial number of firms are late in filing their financial statements. This paper identifies and probes various capital market consequences for late filings of quarterly and annual financial statements. It examines the short- and long-window reaction to late filings, as well as how equity investors process statements accompanying late filing announcements, such as managers declaring intentions to file within/outside the SEC’s allowed grace periods. This paper documents that delayed quarterly filings have distinctly different valuation implications than delayed annual filings over the short and long run, and that accounting problems play a unique role in signaling the seriousness of the delay. It also shows that investors do not accept management’s delay-related assertions at face value, and that delayed filing announcements signal continued poor performance that is not fully reflected in stock prices at the time the announcements are made. Overall, this paper sheds new light on important capital market consequences of filing financial statements late.

We document a market failure to fully respond to loss/profit quarterly announcements. The annualized post portfolio formation return spread between two portfolios formed on extreme losses and extreme profits is approximately 21 percent. This loss/profit anomaly is incremental to previously documented accounting-related anomalies, and is robust to alternative risk adjustments, distress risk, firm size, short sales constraints, transaction costs, and sample periods. In an effort to explain this finding, we show that this mispricing is related to differences between conditional and unconditional probabilities of losses/profits, as if stock prices do not fully reflect conditional probabilities in a timely fashion. © 2009 Elsevier B.V.

Prior studies document the role social media information plays in the stock market and the important dissimilarities between the bond and stock markets. Bridging these two types of literature, we examine the role of social media information in the corporate bond market. Analyzing a broad sample of messages by Twitter individual users, posted just prior to earnings announcements, containing bond, credit risk, and fundamental information, we find that aggregate Twitter opinion (OPI) predicts upcoming announcement bond returns and changes in credit default swap (CDS) spreads, and is associated with future changes in bond yield spreads and credit ratings, thereby providing economically important information to the bond market. This interpretation is bolstered by results from a variety of cross-sectional analyses. Finally, we document an association between OPI and future changes in default risk, which casts light on the nature of the Twitter information underlying our findings. Overall, our findings demonstrate that Twitter appears to disseminate potentially economically important information to even the presumably sophisticated bond and CDS investors, as well as information intermediaries. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting. Funding: P. Mohanram acknowledges financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4589. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation between exchange rate variability and stock return volatility for US multinational firms was established and decomposed into components of systematic and diversifiable risk. A significant increase was found in the volatility of monthly stock returns corresponding to the period of increased exchange rate variability. There was also an increase in market risk for multinational firms.

We advance a theory asserting that CSR performance may exacerbate, not necessarily moderate, a company's negative stock price response to negative events. In testing this theory, we hypothesize and find that CSR performance alleviates (magnifies) the immediate negative stock price response to inadvertent (fraudulent) restatement announcements, and that these findings are robust to specifications that consider alternative CSR measures and a multitude of control variables shown by prior research to have explanatory power for the cross-sectional variation in stock returns. Overall, using restatement announcements as a channel through which CSR performance may affect company value, we show, in contrast to prior research, that depending on management conduct leading to the restatement, a company's CSR performance may destroy, not necessarily enhance, firm value. Our findings may, thus, inform researchers, market participants, and regulators. Data Availability: The data used in this study are publicly available from sources indicated in the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does accounting regime play a role in the well-documented phenomenon of overbidding in M&As? The 2001 regulatory change from a goodwill amortization to a non-amortization regime (SFAS 142) affords us a quasi-experimental setting for testing the consequences of M&A accounting rules for acquirers' bidding decisions. Relying on a novel approach to modeling optimal bidding, our primary finding indicates a significant increase in overbidding in the post-2001 period, suggesting that M&A accounting has real consequences for bidding decisions, and that this result is robust to a battery of sensitivity tests. In addition, supplementary tests show that overbidding is more pronounced in pooling versus purchase transactions, and that the accounting regime's implications for overbidding and acquisition premium are distinct. Overall, our findings shed light on the role accounting plays in shaping managerial decisions—and, ultimately, shareholder wealth—in an important corporate setting. They may thus inform researchers, corporate boards, and standards setters. Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text. JEL Classifications: G34, M41. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We address two research questions in this study. First, is there a change in the prevalence of expectations management to meet or beat analysts' earnings expectations in the aftermath of the 2001-2002 accounting scandals and the passage of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX)? Second, did the mix among the three mechanisms used for meeting or beating analysts' earnings expectations: accrual-based earnings management, real earnings management, and expectations management change in the Post-SOX period? We hypothesize and provide empirical evidence that the observed drop in the frequency of just meeting or beating analysts' earnings expectations is associated with both (1) a decline in the use of downward expectations management and upward accrual-based earnings management in the Post-SOX period relative to the preceding seven-year period and (2) an increase in upward real earnings management activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, German companies have reported consolidated financial statements under German GAAP, U.S. GAAP, or International Accounting Standards (IAS). Market observers, researchers, and regulators have argued that financial statements prepared under the shareholder (or investor) model, such as U.S. GAAP or IAS, provide better information than financial statements prepared under the stakeholder model (German GAAP). They further have argued that U.S. GAAP is more rigorously defined and, therefore, provides information superior to that under IAS. We investigate comparative value relevance, measured as the slope coefficient of the returns/earnings regression. Within our sample of German companies traded on German stock exchanges, the value relevance of U.S. GAAP- and IAS-based earnings is higher than that of German GAAP-based earnings. Our result holds only for profit observations, suggesting that reporting regime does not have an influence on the quality of earnings in the case of loss firms. However, we do not find a significant difference in value relevance between U.S. GAAP and IAS after controlling for self-selection. A major contribution of this research is that, unlike prior research, we measure stock returns for all sample firms in the German stock market only, and therefore are not reliant on the perhaps strong assumption underlying prior studies of similarity of pricing across markets domiciled in different countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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We document a pattern in the day-of-the-week timing of future earnings announcements that is predictable from knowledge of the current quarter's earnings. The pattern mimics the predictable (+, +, 0, -) dependence previously reported in both seasonally differenced quarterly earnings themselves and in estimated abnormal returns at future quarterly earnings announcement dates (the "SUE effect"; see Rendleman, Jones, and Latané [1987]; Bernard and Thomas [1990]). The predictability of abnormal returns at future earnings announcement dates therefore is not independent of the well-documented day-of-the-week seasonal in stock returns (the "DOW effect"; see Osborne [1962]; Cross [1973]; French [1980]; Gibbons and Hess [1981]). Although the DOW effect is too small to fully explain the SUE effect, it appears to contribute to it, since both past SUE and current earnings announcement DOW are incremental in explaining announcement-day estimated abnormal returns. The unclear role of size and the presence of errors in estimating both unexpected earnings and its announcement day suggest caution in interpreting these results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]