Our findings suggest that the business and financial uncertainty surrounding the imminent announcement of a firm's quarterly earnings is significantly augmented by firm information uncertainty: even after controlling for business cash flow variability (or leverage or all other controls employed in our regression analysis), high information risk firms that release accounting information of poor quality have their equity options trade at higher implied volatilities and experience significant implied volatility run-ups up to the EA day, as investors and option market makers push implied volatilities and option premia up, unsure of both what to expect in terms of reported performance and of its mapping to future cash flows. In the same spirit, these firms experience more pronounced declines in volatility after the announcement, implying that market participants experience significantly greater reassurance, as they possibly faced significant uncertainty when making predictions on the content of the announcement.We consider that the direction of our findings conceptually confirms (in our case, for option markets) evidence by Zhang et al. (2013) on the relatively greater importance of public earnings
announcements for firms with higher information risk.
Overall, we interpret our findings as indicative of information risk, proxied by earnings quality, having a significant impact on implied volatility dynamics around earnings announcements, in accordance with past research indicating that the quality of financial statement information significantly relates to idiosyncratic stock return volatility (Rajgopal and Venkatachalam, 2011). However, unlike stock market historic volatility, implied volatility determined in option markets is by definition forward looking: in other words, financial statements quality may have an effect on the determination of forwardlooking expectations about future firm performance.