5. Conclusions
Uncertainty about the future economic performance of firms is expected to influence their stock return volatility (Pastor and Veronesi, 2003;Wei and Zhang, 2003), at the same time when the quality of earnings has been considered as a proxy for information risk, or the likelihood for firm-specific information important for investor decisions to be of poor quality (Francis et al., 2005). In this study,we examine the association between financial reporting quality, measured by assessing the quality of accounting accruals, and levels and changes in implied volatility around quarterly earnings announcements in option markets.We make use of accounting accruals as a proxy for firm information risk, in accordance with past research (Francis et al., 2005; Ecker et al., 2006), given that because the quality of accruals is expected to inform investors about the mapping of accounting earnings into cash flows, with poor accruals quality to be expected to weaken this mapping and, consequently, increase information risk (Francis et al., 2005). We also base our analysis on Rajgopal and Venkatachalam (2011), by distinguishing between sources of uncertainty about the future profitability of firms, or uncertainty about future cash flows from an operating point of view, vs. information about future cash flows stemming from the quality of accounting
information.
We use all US firms from Compustat with option data in Optionmetrics between 1996 and 2010 and first observe that lower (higher) accounting quality is associated with significantly higher (lower) implied volatility in the days around quarterly earnings announcements.We also observe that worse accounting quality is associated with a significant increase in implied volatility in a ten-to one-day window before quarterly earnings announcements, while worse (better) accounting quality is found to relate to a larger decrease or resolution in implied volatility for the next one to ten days after the announcement event. At the same time, our evidence is robust to repeating our analyses for firms experiencing positive vs. negative earnings surprises, which is considered to be indicative of information risk having an effect on the behavior of IV which is both incremental and distinct from the observed directional impact of good vs. bad news announcements testified by past research (Truong et al., 2012). 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 additionally
construct five-by-five portfolios of mean levels and changes in implied volatility around EA, according to volatility of operating cash flows and AQ metrics. We first observe a tendency of implied volatility levels to increase when operating performance volatility increases, and as AQ deteriorates. In this case, for changes in implied volatility, even after controlling for volatility in operating performance, we find 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. Our portfolio results are confirmed by regression analysis, permitting to explicitly control for the significance of the influence of a number of factors with a possible impact on implied volatility levels and changes e.g., firm size, profitability, cash flow generation, leverage, stock market performance and volatility, volatility of operating cash flows, as well as firm-specific liquidity, and analyst forecast characteristics.
Our evidence is indicative of market participants experiencing significantly stronger uncertainty before EA for low accounting quality firms, which is translated into significantly stronger increases in implied volatility before EA as AQ deteriorates, as they are unsure of what to expect in terms of the upcoming reporting of accounting performance, At the same time, low accounting quality is associated with a significantly larger resolution in volatility after EA, implying that market participants experience significantly greater reassurance because of the announcement of earnings explicitly for low AQ firms. Our findings are interpreted as indicative of information risk, for which the quality of accounting accruals is used as a proxy, having a significant impact on the determination of the behavior of implied volatility around earnings announcements. This evidence is in accordance with past research testifying that the quality of financial statement
information significantly relates to idiosyncratic stock return volatility in the stock markets (Rajgopal and Venkatachalam, 2011); however, in contrast to stock market volatility, option implied volatility is expected to be forward looking. In thisway, the quality of accounting information reported in financial statements is observed to have repercussions for the determination of forward-looking expectations about future firm performance by market participants.
As a whole, our findings are consistent with information risk (stemming from the quality of earnings) making market participants exceptionally unsure on what expectations to make about the content of earnings announcements as AQ deteriorates, and experiencing a greater degree of ‘relief’ after the announcement has taken place, even after controlling for uncertainty about future earnings because of performance-related reasons. Our first study complements the study by Kim and Zhang (2013), which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first one to examine the association between financial statement information quality and option market pricing, by highlighting for the first time the association between accounting quality and option market implied volatility. In addition, we consider that our evidence builds on research considering the relation between accounting-based information variables and market outcomes (Bhattacharya et al., 2012), by providing evidence on the full impact of accounting quality, in the case of option markets in addition to equity markets. Finally, our findings provide evidence that firm pricing volatility even in the case of the option markets is affected by two sources of uncertainty about future economic performance: volatility about future cash flows and volatility of cash flows arising from the quality of financial information (Rajgopal and Venkatachalam, 2011), with option market traders to be observed to trade slightly before this information has been officially disseminated in upcoming earnings announcements.