Financial communication during the COVID-19 crisis: Impression management?[La communication financière à l’épreuve de la crise COVID : une gestion des impressions ?]

In this article, we study the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis on the impression management strategies employed by French listed firms. This exogeneous shock had a strong impact on firms' financial results. Hence, we observe if and how managers changed the way they presented information related to non-GAAP earnings, through the use of obfuscation strategies. Data on impression management were manually collected from annual earnings press releases issued by SBF 120 firms during the period 2018-2020. We find that the level of impression management significantly decreased following the COVID-19 crisis, especially for firms in the most affected sectors. Nevertheless, this decline is less pronounced for firms that underperformed relative to their sector and for firms that experienced a significant drop in financial performance (irrespective of the sector to which they belong). Our results suggest that firms whose drop in performance could be attributed to internal causes (very unfavorable results, results below sector standards) remained concerned about their image and maintained their level of impression management despite the crisis.