잠정이익 공정공시에 대한 기업의 전략적 공시 행태

This study provides empirical evidence on the opportunistic behavior of firm managers regarding the fair disclosure of preliminary quarterly earnings. Preliminary earnings announcement made using fair disclosure is a critical event where a firm voluntarily convey the new information on its earnings to the market participants. Firm managers with opportunistic motivation are likely to plan the fair disclosure strategy in a way to hide bad earnings news and highlight good earnings news. In this regard, managers may avoid or delay the fair disclosure of preliminary earnings when the earnings news is bad, in order to reduce the negative impact on market response and save time to deal with the bad earnings performance. The test results support the above managerial opportunism hypothesis, showing that firms with lower earnings performance tend to conduct fair disclosure of preliminary earnings more reluctantly and on a more delayed basis. The findings are robust to the additional analysis using the change variable, in order to control for the potential impact from unobserved firm characteristics. In addition, the market reaction to earnings announcement is substantially lower where the strategy to avoid the fair disclosure on preliminary earnings are implemented, which implies that the opportunistic strategies are based on a rational expectation on the market response. This study, using an ample sample of quarterly earnings announcements, presents the first evidence that the decision on fair disclosure of preliminary earnings can be affected by the opportunistic behaviors of firm managers, and accordingly have implications on the relevant disclosure policy.