Competing Earnings Announcements; Study of queuing theory of Investor behavior in the Analysis of Earnings Announcements

The purpose of this paper is to examine queuing theory for investors' behavior facing publication congestion of quarterly announcements of companies' earnings in a day. Accordingly, two measures have been used for queuing of earnings announcements: 1.The visibility of companies; 2. the cost of earnings announcement processing. According to the standard method of the event research, this study has been conducted based on the information released from approved companies in Tehran Stock Exchange, in the period 2010 to 2015, with a selective sample of 202 companies and 4777 earnings announcements. Research hypotheses' test has been performed using generalized panel and regression estimators. The results indicate information content of earnings announcements in Tehran Stock Exchange and the influence of some earnings announcements on the market reaction issued in a specific day. Moreover, the earnings announcements of the companies which issue the quarterly earnings announcements during the day, along with higher rates in four indices including cost of advertising, company size, the volume of exchanges and total accruals rather than other companies in the same day, cause unexpected transfer of earnings due to market's reaction from the earnings announcement window into the period after the earnings announcement. Meanwhile, two indicators, discretionary accrual and the number of income items, have no effects on the queuing of earnings announcements.