Our evidence points toward information risk significantly increasing implied volatility before EA and contributing to larger decreases after the event, indicating that option market participants are exceptionally unsure on what expectations to make about the announcement of earnings as AQ deteriorates, and experience a greater degree of ‘relief’ after the event, even after controlling for uncertainty about future earnings arising from purely performance-related reasons. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the second one to examine the impact of the quality of financial statement information on option market pricing, following Kim and Zhang (2013), who testify that the amount of opacity in earnings significantly contributes to the steepness of option-implied volatility smirks in individual equity options. In this regard, we consider that our evidence builds on research considering the relation between accounting-based information variables and market outcomes (Bhattacharya et al., 2012), by pointing toward a greater scope of impact of accounting quality, in the case of option markets in addition to equity markets. Finally, our findings provide further evidence that firm volatility pricing in option markets, in addition to equity markets, is affected by two sources of uncertainty about a firm’s future economic performance: volatility about future cash flows as well as volatility of cash flows stemming from the quality of financial information (Rajgopal and Venkatachalam, 2011).
The rest of paper is organised as follows: Section 2 reviews in more detail the related literature which provides motive for this study and presents the research hypotheses that are tested. In Section 3, the methodology and the sample selection process are presented. Section 4 reports our empirical findings, while the last section concludes the paper.