Furthermore, in order to completely isolate the effect of investor uncertainty about firms’ expected economic performance from uncertainty purely arising from the quality of accounting information, we construct twenty five (five-byfive, double-sorted) portfolios of mean implied volatility levels and changes around EA days, by sorting sample firms first on accounting quality metrics and then on historic volatility of operating cash flows (that serves as a control for firm performance uncertainty). Results indicate a clear and significant tendency of implied volatility levels to increase when operating performance volatility increases, and accounting quality deteriorates. Even after controlling for volatility in operating performance, our initial findings are confirmed in that one observes a significant trend for implied volatility to increase before EA as AQ decreases, while implied volatility is observed to significantly dissolve more for lower vs. higher AQ firms, after the announcement of earnings has taken place.
The main finding of this paper, that information risk, as proxied by poor quality of quarterly accounting information, is positively associated with more pronounced changes in implied volatility around earnings announcements, is further confirmed by panel regression estimation, which permits to explicitly control for the effect and significance of a number of factors possibly associated with implied volatility levels and changes, such as firm size, profitability, cash flow generation, leverage, stock market performance and historic volatility, variability of operating cash flows, firm-specific liquidity, and analyst following and forecasts.
It should be noted that past research has differentially examined the impact of good vs. bad operating performance news. Truong et al. (2012) for earnings announcements and Rogers et al. (2009) for management forecasts have found that option markets do not uniformly respond to good vs. bad news or surprises. However, the focus of our study is on the impact ofinformation risk (rather than performance risk) on option implied volatility. This is because, for example, a firm may be a poor performer, however, its financial statements may not pose difficulties and uncertainty with respect to forecasting its future prospects, no matter how poor those may be. In this way, the focus of this study is on the impact of information risk, for which accounting quality (i.e., the extent to which accounting accruals map and translate into cash flows, changes in revenues and tangible assets) is employed as a proxy, on option implied volatility levels and changes around earnings announcements (hereafter, EA), after controlling for firm performance, as well as volatility in operating performance. Moreover, we control for the impact of AQ on the behavior of IV around earnings announcement by simultaneously considering whether the firm in question experienced a positive or a negative earnings surprise among our robustness controls, so as to isolate the influence of information risk on IV behavior, from the (directional) impact of good vs. bad news about the firm, regarding the formation of IV expectations around earnings announcements.