The timeliness of 10-K filings, financial performance, and stock returns

Using a dataset constructed from the EDGAR database, this study investigates whether the timing of filing 10-Ks contains useful information to investors. We argue and find that firms with better earnings news are more likely to file their 10-Ks early. We further show that firms experience earnings increase would accelerate the filing of their 10-Ks. We explore whether the timeliness measure is useful for predicting future financial performance and stock returns. We find that firms filing 10-Ks early in the current year are more likely to have better earnings and higher stock returns in future years. Our results are robust to different measures of timeliness, before and after the statutory filing deadline changes, and subsamples of firms with large or small market capitalization.