The Relationship between Delay in Announcing Quarterly Forecasts of Annual Earnings and the Type of Earnings News

Abstract

The current study aims to examine the relationship between delay in the announcement of quarterly forecasts of annual earn­ings and the type of earnings news in a unique context. Running a multiple linear regression on data collected from Rahavard Novin software and the companies’ financial statements, is the method of this study to investigate this relationship. Consistent with the pattern of good news early, bad news late, it was found that there is a positive relationship between the bad news type and the amount of delay in announcing quarterly forecast of annual earnings; so that the firms with negative adjustments in earnings forecast (bad news), on average, have 12 more days delay in the announcement. Considering other variables showed that as coverage percentage - a sign of success - increases, the amount of delay in announcing earnings forecast decreases, but companies with losses per share, on average, have an additional delay of about 6 days. The results obtained indicate that at least, in some industries there is certain time for reporting. Finally, it became clear that in the period after the adoption of the new disclosure instruction, despite the increased deadline, the amount of delay in earnings announcement has declined by about 2 days. In this study, for the first time in Iran, one of the company’s financial news (quarterly forecasts of annual earnings), have been classified into good and bad, based on comparison with the market expectation, and the relationship between the news type and the amount of delay in announcing the news, has been examined.