Financial Ratios in Annual and Interim Reports of Greek Listed Companies

Abstract:     
The phenomenon of interim reporting is recent in Europe although in the USA it is dated back to the mid of 1950's for semi-annual reporting and to the beginning of 1970's for quarterly reporting. The differentiation between interim and annual financial reports is investigated in this study. Panel data of financial ratios for the time period 1974-2006 for annual reports and 2002-2006 for interim (semi-annual) reports indicate that none of the financial ratios selected in this study follows a normal distribution. Only QATA for semi-annual reports with outliers excluded follows the Gamma distribution and NISA follows the Erlang distribution.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 34

Keywords: distributions, financial ratios, annual and interim reports

JEL Classification: M40, M41

working papers series