摘要
The purpose of this paper is to feed the debate regarding investor’s reaction to relevant financial information releases as yearly earnings announcements(EAs)with a specific focus on financial distressed firms.Using the event study methodology and adopting two well-known tests in the literature,we analyzed Italian listed companies in the period of 2008-2016,to detect whether there is a market reaction to EAs releases for firms in financial distress,adopting as a measure of financial distress the presence in the audit report of a going concern opinion(GCO).In the Italian legislation,the GCO must be communicated immediately to the market and this can be done before,simultaneously or after EAs.The achieved results shed light on the negative impact of EAs of distressed firms receiving a GCO.On the other hand,the possibility that negative abnormal returns are mainly due to the GCO release cannot be neglected.Hence,through additional tests,we found that effects of EAs are more persistent and significant than GCOs,in accordance with the prevailing literature,which sees,on average,EAs predominant information for investors.Our study is pioneering in disentangling possible effects of confounding events for the Italian stock market.The EAs superior effect confirms the dynamics characterizing weak and small equity markets as Italy where,before GCOs releases,some relevant and more precise information(such as earnings magnitude)is often held by shareholders because of the high percentage of family firms and/or concentrated ownership,demonstrating also the weakness of auditor profession if compared with other developed countries.
