Analysts and practitioners have long sought information on order backlog (OB) as indicators of future sales, and in turn, of future earnings and stock returns. OB disclosures, though mandatory for annual reports, are voluntarily included in some quarterly reports and are sometimes presented only in textual narration. Given that the required annual OB data may be partially preempted by voluntary quarterly disclosures, we test whether quarterly OB disclosures are used by market participants, especially the qualitative OB disclosures, which were not tested before. We show that OB growth is helpful in forecasting future sales and thus assign a positive tone to qualitative OB disclosures that indicate OB growth. Both quarterly quantitative OB increases and positive qualitative tone are associated with immediate and drift returns, after controlling for other disclosures during the quarterly earnings announcements and variables that affect voluntary disclosure. Our results indicate that regulators may need to consider requiring OB disclosures in quarterly intervals when OB is sufficiently material.

长期以来，分析师和从业者一直在寻找有关订单积压 (OB) 的信息，将其作为未来销售的指标，进而作为未来收益和股票回报的指标。OB 披露虽然对年度报告是强制性的，但自愿包含在一些季度报告中，有时仅以文字叙述的形式呈现。鉴于所需的年度 OB 数据可能会被自愿的季度披露部分抢占，我们测试了市场参与者是否使用季度 OB 披露，尤其是之前未测试的定性 OB 披露。我们表明 OB 增长有助于预测未来的销售，因此为表明 OB 增长的定性 OB 披露赋予积极的基调。季度定量 OB 增加和积极的定性基调都与即时和漂移回报相关，在控制季度收益公告期间的其他披露和影响自愿披露的变量之后。我们的结果表明，当 OB 足够重要时，监管机构可能需要考虑要求每季度披露 OB。