[Purpose] The prior notice on disclosure of final earnings (referred to as “prior notice” hereafter), which was introduced in Korea in 2005, is a disclosure that gives advance notice of the earnings announcement date prior to the announcement of a...
[Purpose] The prior notice on disclosure of final earnings (referred to as “prior notice” hereafter), which was introduced in Korea in 2005, is a disclosure that gives advance notice of the earnings announcement date prior to the announcement of a corporate financial result. Prior notice has been known to increase the salience of earnings disclosure through voluntary disclosure and at the same time increase the interest of information users including investors, thereby increasing trading volume and volatility on the earnings disclosure date (Kang and Choi, 2017). On the other hand, stock price crash is a phenomenon in which a company’s stock price suddenly plummets. It has been reported that the more opaque accounting information is, the higher the crash risk (Hutton et al., 2009). This study predicted that if the prior notice increase the investor's interest on profit information, managers will not hide bad news or provide opaque accounting information, so that information asymmetry between managers and information users will be alleviated. The relieving information asymmetry will also affect the stock price crash risk.
[Methodology] In order to analyze this relation, this research set whether or not prior notice was used as a variable of interest and the crash risk was analyzed as a dependent variable.
[Findings] As a result of the empirical analysis, it was found that the crash risk is low for corporates that have announced the prior notice. This result was the same when measuring the crash risk with different variables. On the other hand, by analyzing the relation of time lag between the prior notice and the actual profit announcement date and the crash risk, it was confirmed that the time lag and the crash risk had a negative(-) relationship. The relationship between the time lag and the crash risk confirms that the prior notice has value as information and that an appropriate amount of time is required for information analysis.
[Policy Implications] The results of this study will serve as evidence that the prior notice increases the salience of information, thereby improving the information asymmetry between management and investors. It also suggests that the financial authorities should be more proactive in introducing information disclosure systems such as prior notice for the benefit of market participants.