Empirical examination of disclosure environment in Japan - quarterly earnings announcements and management forecasts -

日本证券交易所制定的及时披露规则提供了独特的披露环境。具体来说，该规则要求公司经理披露自己的盈利预测。为满足这一要求，90%以上的上市公司进行了预测和修正。除了在非常有限的范围内自愿披露外，如此普遍的管理层预测在发达的主要资本市场中很少发生。本研究计划探讨管理预测的性质。覆盖所有上市公司的实证结果表明：(1)管理层在年度收益公告日的初步预测似乎过于乐观，随后在会计年度内连续下调。这一发现与在美国市场观察到的情况不一致，在美国，他们的自愿预测通常更谨慎，对坏消息也更先发制人。显然，日本经理人的过度乐观引发了人们对其预测决策有效性的质疑；然而，我们也发现(2)管理层预测的未来收益增长的可预测性远远优于已实现会计数字衡量的可预测性。下级管理层对这种预测偏差的动机及其市场反应仍有待我们未来的研究。

Timely Disclosure Rule set by the stock exchanges in Japan provides with a unique disclosure environment. Specifically the rule requests corporate managers to reveal their own earnings forecasts. To comply with this requirement, more than 90 percent of listed firms make forecasting and revising. Such prevalence of management forecast, except voluntary disclosure in a far limited scope, rarely happens among well-developed major capital markets. This research project examines the properties of management forecasts. Empirical results covering all listed companies suggest that (1)initial management forecasts at annual earnings announcement dates seem to be overly optimistic, which are followed by consecutive downward revisions during the fiscal/years. This finding is inconsistent with the one observed in the US market, where their voluntary forecasts are, in general, more cautious and more preemptive for bad news. Apparently managers' over-optimism in Japan raise a question about the decision usefulness of their forecasts ; however, we also find that (2)the predictability of future earnings growth in management forecast overwhelmingly outperforms the one measured by realized accounting numbers. Underling management's motivation of this bias of forecasting and its market reaction remains opening issues for our future research.