The Effects Of Audit Opinions And Earnings Surprises On The Timeliness Of Annual Announcements

The investors in our security market mainly depend on the firms'annual announcements. The listed companies always manage the earnings for different purposes, so the management of the annual announcements is our focus. However the past studies are mainly about the management of the annual announcements'contents. There are fewer people concerning about the management of the timeliness of the annual announcements. The annual announcements are announced between January and April. But they do not distribute evenly. Many literatures show that the timing of the annual announcements is affected by many factors, and two of them are audit opinions and unexpected earnings.This study investigates the effects of audit opinions and unexpected earnings on the timeliness of annual announcements, meanwhile considering the special background of our market. The foreign literatures are mainly about the foreign market. The timeliness of our market is different with the foreign markets. So the characteristics are very different too. Some foreign literatures use the samples of our capital market, but the data is before 2000.However, there is something new after 2000.There are fewer national literatures investigating the timeliness of the annual announcements.After the comparisons and estimations of the foreign and national literatures, our sample consists of announcements between 1997 and 2004 and we investigate the effects of audit opinions and unexpected earnings on the timeliness of annual announcements and the interaction effect between them. The sample consist the announcements after 2000 and we consider our special background too, so it is more applicable to the Chinese environment.In this paper we use the signaling theory, the signaling theory in games theory, the stakeholder theory and the internal reporting hypothesis. We extend the existing literature by empirically testing the following hypotheses:...