The Influence of Annual Reports’ Disclosure Delay on the Analysts’ Forecast Behavior

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This paper carries out an empirical study on how annual reports’ disclosure delay affects analyst forecast accuracy and optimism, based on 6,523 firm-year observations of 2,287 A-share listed firms in the Chinese stock market between 2016 and 2019. Results show that there is a significant negative correlation between analyst forecast accuracy and annual reports’ disclosure delay, which indicates that, affected by the low quality of accounting information in untimely disclosed annual reports, analysts tend to be less accurate in forecasting the performance of companies; moreover, there is a significant positive correlation between analysts’ optimism and annual reports disclosure delay, indicating that in order to turn things around, the management of firms that have delayed disclosing their annual reports in the current year will carry out more positive earnings management in the next year, which leads to analysts’ optimism about their profitability in the next year. After eliminating the problem of heteroscedasticity and endogeneity, our conclusions remain valid. Our research suggests that investors need to be more cautious about analysts’ forecasts on firms with annual reports’ delayed disclosure and that analysts should verify the accounting information in belated annual reports through multiple channels and make more conservative estimates.