Do First and Third Quarter Unaudited Financial Reports Matter? The Portuguese Case

Carlos Alves and F. Teixeira Dos Santos

European Accounting Review, 2008, vol. 17, issue 2, 361-392

Abstract: In this paper we investigate the incremental information content of a sample of 1,751 quarterly financial reports, issued in Portugal between 1994 and 2004. Specifically, we examine price and volume reactions to financial reports issued in: (1) the first and third quarters, which are unaudited; (2) the second quarter, which is subject to limited audit; and (3) the fourth quarter (the annual report) which is subject to a full audit. We conclude that unaudited first and third quarter financial reports that include condensed income statements and balance sheets convey enough new information to the market to spur significant price and trading reactions. This conclusion holds before and after the first and third quarter reports were made mandatory in 1999. We also found that the incremental information content of the second quarter report dropped after 1999, presumably because part of its information content was usurped by the newly required first quarter reports. Finally, we found evidence that mandatory audited reports announcements spur more significant price reactions than mandatory unaudited financial reports. In contrast to evidence from other countries, we found that smaller firms' disclosures do not generate a larger reaction than large firms' disclosures.

Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09638180802156399 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:euract:v:17:y:2008:i:2:p:361-392

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REAR20

DOI: 10.1080/09638180802156399

Access Statistics for this article

European Accounting Review is currently edited by Laurence van Lent

More articles in European Accounting Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().