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hose in Chen et al. (2007), who use forecasts from a sample of firms that includes the S&P MidCap 400 and SmallCap 600 and focus on the frequency of management forecasts of all kinds and conference calls. As noted earlier, Chen et al. (2007) find that their family firms provide fewer forecasts and host fewer conference calls in general than non-family firms. The one exception to this is that their family firms tend to provide more short-run bad-news earnings forecasts than their non-family firms. Our results, when considered with theirs, suggest that the relative severity or importance of certain agency problems and the costs of reducing them are likely to be different for the large family firms that we examine when compared to the broader set of family firms in Chen et al.'s sample. Our studies together also suggest that the type of voluntary disclosure matters when studying the incentives of family and non-family firms to disclose. In particular, we restrict our sample to quarterly earnings forecasts whereas Chen et al. employ an annual (year t +1) voluntary disclosure indicator that equals one if the firm issued a management forecast of any kind (annual or quarterly about earnings, cash flows, revenue, etc.) and another that equals one if the firm holds at least one conference call in a given year. Thus, differences in our findings may be concentrated in the non-earnings subset of forecasts, a result worthy of additional analysis.

5. Conclusion.

Family firms have a unique structure in that founding family members or their descendants have significant control either because they hold significant shares of the firm's stock or because they are actively involved in management or, at a minimum, sit on the firm's board of directors. Academic interest in this unique structure has resulted in a significant body of research, much of it focused on the consequences of the differences in agency problems that arise in family firms and firms with a more severe separation of ownership and control problem. In this paper, we study the quarterly earnings forecasts issued by the management of large (S&P 500) family and non-family firms between 1998 and 2006. Our purpose is to determine whether the quality and timeliness of these voluntary disclosures, as well as the market response to them, are consistent with family firms using them to reduce the relatively severe agency costs arising from the conflict between controlling and non-controlling shareholders inherent in family firms—or whether the longer investment horizon of family members and the close alignment of owner and manager interests in such firms mitigates the need to differentiate themselves in terms of disclosures (Ali et al. 2007, Chen et al. 2007, Wang 2006, Jensen and Meckling 1976).

We divide our sample of forecasts into those released before the end of the quarter, which we refer to as guidance, and those released after the end of the quarter but before the earnings announcements, which we refer to as preannouncements. We expect differences in quality (as measured by forecast specificity, timeliness and accuracy) and analysts' and investors' responses between forecasts issued by family and non-family firms, if any exist, to be concentrated in the guidance sample. We do not expect differe本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。