The Empirical Study On The Information Content Of Semiannual Accounting Announcement

Whether accounting data does have information content is a hot topic in the empirical accounting academe. A great deal of domestic and foreign scholars'research have answered this question. Their results indicated that the release of annual report can cause market reaction. It means that the information provided by annual report is useful for decision-making.Business uncertainty is increasing as competition is becoming increasingly fierce. From the perspective of timeliness of accounting information, interim financial report reflecting a shorter operating period has raised the attention of supervising departments and the general investors in recent years.Because more accounting estimate is used in the interim report and the interim report lacks of effective external supervision (the interim report mustn't be audited), therefore, the analysis of the interim report is of extreme importance. Every July and August when the semiannual reports are issued, facing the reports numberless as the sand, one question is asked: Is the information disclosed in the semiannual report useful?This dissertation attempts to answer this question empirically using the"Event study"method.This article divides into five parts. The first part is an introduction; the second part is the literature review; the third part is the theoretical analysis; the fourth part presents the empirical analysis, including the basic statistical analysis and the regression analysis and the fifth part concludes.The second part mainly focuses on the review of relevant documents from domestic and overseas, and also on the summary and comparison of former study. It lays foundation for this article. The reviewed literature mainly involves MacNeal (1939), Ball & Brown (1968; 1972), Jones & Litzenberger (1970), Beaver (1970), Brown & Kennelly (1972), Jordon (1973), Sunder (1973; 1975), Brown (1970), Beaver (1968), Beaver, Clarke & Wright (1979), Foster (1977), Kross & Schroeder (1984), Beaver& Ducks (1972), Patell & Kaplan (1997), Dechow, Kothari& Watts (1998), Wu Shinong & Huang...