讲座人： Greg Clinch, Professor

讲座主题：Forecasts of Earnings Announcements Dates: Evidence from a Mandatory Regime

摘要：This paper studies the trade-offs in information content learned from forecasts of earnings announcement dates obtained from a mandatory forecasting regime (China) versus a voluntary regime (US). First, we show that forecasts in China, like the US, embed unrevealed firm performance information and that investors respond to forecast disclosures in a manner consistent with their information content. Furthermore, unique to the US, both the voluntary forecast decision and the timing of the forecast convey incremental information about firm performance. Unique to China, the timing of the mandatory forecast is uniformly fixed and on average much earlier than their endogenous counterparts in the US. This feature enables us to estimate the trade-off between timeliness and accuracy of forecasts – a 10% increase in timeliness of forecasts increases absolute forecast errors by 7%. Despite this trade-off, 25% of earnings-related news is learned on the date of the initial forecast in China compared to 11% in the US relative to news learned on the date of the earnings announcement. Finally we ask whether China firms who were ostensibly the target of the mandatory regulation – the likely silent firms under a voluntary regime do in fact provide informative forecasts under the mandatory regime. We construct and estimate a linear forecasting model and show that the precision of the manager’s private information is associated with the decision to forecast in the US. Using this parameter, we identify the counter-factually silent China firms and find that these firms also provide useful information via their forecasts. Our collective evidence informs policymakers of a) the role of the uniform timing of the mandatory forecast in improving the timeliness of information concerning firm performance and b) suggests that mandatory forecasting induced otherwise silent firms to provide useful information, but at the loss of information from the voluntary disclosure choice itself.

讲座时间：2016年09月26日，周一，13:30开始

讲座地点：学院南路学术会堂702

讲座人简介： Greg Clinch教授是墨尔本大学（The University of Melbourne）会计系资深教授，是财务会计领域的国际知名学者，近期研究兴趣为：会计信息在资本市场的作用、IFRS准则等。他1988年博士毕业于斯坦福大学，先后任教于沃顿商学院、MIT、NYU等世界知名高校，在Journal of Accounting and Economics、The Accounting Review、Journal of Accounting Research、Review of Accounting Studies、Contemporary Accounting Research等期刊发表诸多论文。他曾是The Accounting Review副主编，现在是Journal of Accounting Research、Contemporary Accounting Research等期刊编委，同时任所有会计5大顶尖期刊和金融顶尖期刊Journal of Finance的审稿人。

[编辑]：张萌