Has Form 8-K reporting become timelier post-regulation fair disclosure and the Sarbanes–Oxley Act? Initial evidence

Our paper examines the timeliness of Form 8-K filings immediately after significant US regulation and legislation. Our events are issuance of regulation fair disclosure by the SEC and Congress’s passage of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act. We use Carter and Soo’s (1999) sample from 1993 for the pre-SOX and pre-FD data. For all firms that filed an 8-K in the sample periods, the post-FD sample filings are timelier than the pre-FD sample, and the post-SOX filings are more timely than most of the post-FD filings. For large firms, the post-SOX sample has significantly shorter filing lags in most cases relative to the post-FD sample, but we only find weak evidence of the shorter filing lags resulting in improved compliance with stated Form 8-K filing deadlines. We conclude that management reporting behavior has positively changed post-SOX, but that the results are less conclusive post-FD.