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The purpose of this paper is to assess management earnings forecasts in a continuous disclosure environment.

A large sample of hand checked Australian management earnings forecasts are examined. These data are analysed using a series of logistic regressions. Hypotheses are proposed and tested based on Skinner's litigation cost hypothesis. Increases in non‐routine management earnings forecasts post‐2000; and increases in the proportion of such forecasts that contain bad news are predicted. The relationship between forecast specificity and forecast news content is investigated.

It was found that, post‐2000, legislative changes and increased enforcement action by ASIC were followed by increased disclosure of non‐routine management earnings forecasts. For routine forecasts, no significant increase in forecast disclosure is observed. This result is consistent with Skinner as is the finding that the increased disclosure is only apparent for bad news non‐routine forecasts. For the second objective, evidence was found that the larger the gap between market expectations and actual performance the more specific the forecast, but only for bad news forecasts.

The study extends the small amount of research investigating the characteristics of management earnings forecasts. It also provides an assessment of the effectiveness of efforts by ASIC to ensure that management meet their continuous disclosure obligations.

This paper aims to make a comparison, different from existing literature solely focusing on voluntary earnings forecasts and ex post earnings surprise, between the effects of mandatory earnings surprise warnings and voluntary information disclosure issued by management teams on financial analysts in terms of the number of followings and the accuracy of earnings forecasts.

This paper uses panel data analysis with fixed effects on data collected from Chinese public firms between 2006 and 2010. It uses an exogenous regulation enforcement to minimise the endogeneity problem.

This paper finds that financial analysts are less likely to follow firms which mandatorily issue earnings surprise warnings ex ante than those voluntarily issue earnings forecasts. Moreover, ex post, they issue less accurate and more dispersed forecasts on former firms. The results support Brown et al.’s (2009) finding in the USA and suggest that the earnings surprise warnings affect information asymmetries.

This paper justifies the mandatory earnings surprise warnings policy issued by Chinese Securities Regulatory Commission in 2006.

Mandatory earnings surprise is a unique practical regulation for publicly listed firms in China. This paper, for the first time, provides empirical evaluation on the effectiveness of a mandatory information disclosure policy in China. Consistent with existing literature on information disclosure by public firms in other countries, this paper finds that, in China, voluntary information disclosure captures more private information than mandatory information disclosure on corporate earnings ability.

It has been two decades since the first academic paper shone a spotlight on non-GAAP earnings. The past 20 years of research investigates concerns over the misuse of these disclosures and resulted in some significant changes to accounting and reporting standards across the globe. This paper aims to document the history of non-GAAP reporting and outline the emerging themes of the now matured practice of non-GAAP reporting.

This systematic literature review searches two popular databases to identify the academic publications relating to non-GAAP reporting between 2002 and 2022. The paper uses bibliographic mapping to present the key statistics of the non-GAAP reporting field of research.

The non-GAAP reporting environment started out as the “wild West’ but, through regulation and public awareness, emerged as an important supplement to the traditional outputs of financial reporting. Current consensus is recent non-GAAP earnings are informative to users but there is lack of research into qualitative non-GAAP disclosures and the vast body of archival research needs triangulating with more experimental studies.

This paper contributes to the literature by documenting the past 20 years of non-GAAP reporting and identifying the important existing and emerging research areas concerning non-GAAP earnings disclosures.

This paper aimed to explore the effect of a regulatory change pertaining to earnings forecasts disclosure from a mandatory to a voluntary regime on the valuation of Malaysian initial public offerings (IPOs).

The study employed ordinary least square (OLS) regression and quantile regression to analyse the impact of disclosure of earnings forecasts regulation on the valuation of IPOs which comprised 458 IPOs reported for the period 2000–2017 on Bursa Malaysia.

This paper revealed that the regulatory change in forecasted earnings disclosure from a mandatory to a voluntary regime, effective from 1 February 2008, had a negative impact on the valuation of IPOs. The regime change did not improve the transparency of firms issuing IPOs. In fact, the absence of forecasted earnings information in most IPO prospectuses caused ex ante uncertainties to increase. Voluntary disclosure, however, had a significant positive relationship with the valuation of the IPOs issued during the global financial crisis period (2008–2010). Firms concealed their poor qualities by excluding forecasted earnings information from their prospectuses in order to have a fair valuation.

The findings may be used by policymakers as guidance in improving the existing regulation regarding the disclosure of forecasted earnings.

This paper provides new insight on the effect of a regulatory change pertaining to earnings forecasts disclosure from a mandatory to a voluntary regime on the valuation of Malaysian IPOs. It also provides evidence that the regulatory change of earnings forecast disclosure affects the IPOs' values listed during the global financial crisis period.

This paper synthesizes existing experimental research in the area of investor perceptions and offers directions for future research. Investor-related experimental research has grown substantially, especially in the last decade, as it has made valuable contributions in establishing causal links, examining underlying process measures, and examining areas with little available data. Within this review, I examine 121 papers and identify three broad categories that affect investor perceptions: information format, investor features, and disclosure credibility. Information format describes how investors are influenced by information salience, information labeling, reporting and accounting complexity, financial statement recognition, explanatory disclosures, and proposed disclosure changes. Investor features describes investors’ use of heuristics, investor preferences, and the effect of investor experience. Disclosure credibility is influenced by external and internal assurance, management credibility, disclosure characteristics, and management incentives. Using this framework, I summarize the existing research and identify areas that would benefit from additional research.

This paper aims to examine the characteristics of firms that voluntary disclose generally accepted accounting principals (GAAP)-compliant statements of income, statement of cash flows (SCF) and balance sheet (BS) concurrently with quarterly earnings releases. Cardinal motivation of the paper stems from the increasing demand over the past decade by professional analysts and the Securities and Exchange Commission for concurrent disclosure of GAAP-compliant financial statements with earnings’ announcements.

Using hand-collected archival data, a random sample was identified as disclosing GAAP-compliant SCF and BS with their quarterly earnings releases compared to a control sample identified as non-GAAP-compliant disclosing firms during the 36-month period of 2009-2011, and several hypotheses are tested to determine managements’ incentives to disclose GAAP-compliant versus non-GAAP financials with their earnings releases.

The results in this paper suggest that debt financing, corporate governance, operating performance, earnings volatility, industry membership (such as technology and more research and development-intensive) and complexity of operations (number of segments) are significant characteristics of firms electing to concurrently disclose GAAP-compliant SCF and BS with earnings releases.

The findings discussed in this paper are of special interest to financial reporting policymakers, financial analysts, firm managers and stakeholders and academics.

The voluntary disclosure literature on quarterly earnings releases is extended by differentiating between GAAP-compliant and non-GAAP-compliant voluntary disclosers. The specific findings of this study may provide valuable input to policymakers as they study prevailing voluntary disclosure rules and practices.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether non‐mandated earnings disclosures include value‐relevant information and affect information asymmetry and stock market liquidity.

The event study methodology explores the informational content of good, bad and neutral voluntary earnings disclosures. The OLS panel regression framework is, then, used to analyze information asymmetry and stock market liquidity subsequent to both categories of voluntary earnings disclosures (i.e. earnings forecasts and quarterly earnings disclosures).

Empirical tests show that voluntary earnings disclosures include material information and that bad news is released in an untimely fashion leading to information leakage in the pre‐announcement period. The results also indicate that quarterly earnings enhance stock market liquidity by shrinking bid‐ask spreads. However, earnings forecasts exacerbate information asymmetry before and after the announcement date. This result confirms the existence of information leakage and suggests that managers have considerable discretion whether to make a forecast, and in deciding its timing, form, and specificity.

This paper examines stock market liquidity around voluntary earnings disclosures using effective spreads. Future research should examine other proxies for market liquidity, i.e. market depth.

The results provide insights on the positive benefits of a disclosure policy. Companies have to provide investors with better and timely information in order to mitigate the information leakage risk and thus improve stock market liquidity.

This paper provides new evidence about information content, information asymmetry and stock market liquidity around voluntary earnings disclosures in France. Unlike financial statements disclosures, quarterly earnings and earnings forecasts are isolated events that can be evaluated by the market with less noise.

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize insights from existing research on the disclosure of non-generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) earnings, from an international point of view, and to suggest several avenues for future research in this area.

In conjunction with the analysis of existing research, the paper examines how different regulators and accounting standard setters have approached the topic of non-GAAP earnings disclosure.

The paper shows how non-GAAP earnings have been found to be more informative than GAAP earnings in several scenarios (countries where non-GAAP disclosures are compulsory, countries where these disclosures are voluntary but regulated and countries where they are not regulated). However, in certain circumstances, these disclosures may also mislead investors. Corporate governance mechanisms can curb managers’ opportunistic use of these measures.

The paper provides the growing number of academic researchers in this emerging area with a foundation and agenda upon which they can build their research.

This paper explores the relationship between earnings management and firms' value through the moderating effect of the missing elements – corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and state ownership in Russian companies. The main argument of the paper is that CSR disclosure can be used as a mitigating mechanism to weaken the negative relationship between earnings manipulation and market value. Additionally test whether state ownership is an important moderating factor in this relationship are conducted as state has always played an important role in the emerging Russian market.

The hypotheses are tested on panel data for 223 publicly listed Russian firms for the period 2012–2018. A number of robustness tests are used to check the obtained results for consistency. Following previous research GMM method is employed to address endogeneity concerns.

Supported by stakeholder theory, it is observed that firms that disclosed more CSR information experience a weaker negative relationship between earnings management and market value because investors and other stakeholders positively evaluate a positive CSR image. This negative effect of earnings management on market value is even weaker for state-owned companies as market participants appreciate involvement of state-owned companies in CSR activities and place greater expectations on these firms to be responsible without clear understanding whether these actions are “window dressing” for this type of companies or not.

The study results provide new insights into the relation between earnings management, firm's value, CSR disclosure and state ownership in emerging-market firms. The paper highlight the importance of considering country-specific factors, such as state ownership, while analysing the market reaction on CSR disclosure and earnings management since the institutional peculiarities may help to explain differences in the obtained results.

The authors investigate whether abnormal tone in corporate narrative disclosures is associated with earnings management and earnings quality, in an emerging market context. Based on agency theory and opportunistic/impression management perspective, this study examines whether executives manage disclosure tone to support their opportunistic behavior, when using earnings management.

This study uses a sample of earnings press releases of publicly traded firms in the MENA region during 2014–2019. It employs textual analysis to measure disclosure tone. The authors estimate abnormal disclosure tone after controlling for firm characteristics. Discretionary accruals proxy for earnings management and are estimated using Modified Jones model. Earnings quality is measured using accounting-based and market-based proxies: earnings smoothness, persistence, predictability and value relevance/informativeness.

Results show a positive association between abnormal disclosure tone and earnings management. Additionally, results show that earnings persistence is higher for firms with lower levels of abnormal disclosure tone. Results are sustained for earnings smoothness, but not for predictability and value relevance/informativeness.

Results provide initial evidence of management's use of tone management jointly with earnings management. This adds to prior studies adopting the opportunistic perspective of disclosure tone, through showing that discretionary tone in narrative disclosures can be strategically used by management to influence investors' perceptions.

The results provide valuable insight to board of directors, auditors and market participants on the possible biases emerging from tone of narrative disclosures in corporate reports. For regulators and standard-setters, results shed light on the need for regulations and rules beyond financial statements, to guide disclosure of narrative information in different corporate reports.

This study contributes to the rare evidence that investigates textual disclosure characteristics to uncover management's opportunistic practices and assess earnings quality. Where majority of studies concentrate on developed markets, this study provides novel evidence of emerging markets by examining the association between abnormal disclosure tone and earnings management/earnings quality. Also, it validates the tone management model proposed by Huang et al. (2014) for capturing tone manipulation.