Comment by btown

There's also just a mathematical way to look at volatility here, which is that if you look at (say) the average monthly result as a statistic for the reporting period, longer reporting periods have lower variance than shorter reporting periods.

It's something of a diversification benefit - when you're able to smooth over months, as long as they're not all perfectly correlated (your shock just keeps hitting over and over and you can't stop it) - your results will have lower variance once normalized for elapsed time.

What I can't speak to is whether this is a benefit to economic stability. Say an industry is shifting rapidly in a certain direction. Companies less able to adapt would be less quickly "punished" for that lack of adaptation.

The question is whether that adaptation curve is "a company may need extra time and upfront investment in transformation, but can get back on the curve, so giving them grace helps to stabilize jobs and markets..." vs. "a company that falls off the curve will continue to fall behind, so faster reporting incentivizes companies to innovate and not get into an irrecoverable state that destroys value."

And I think this question varies so widely between situations that it's difficult to standardize. Perhaps economists have looked at this more thoughtfully. Either way, this is an incredibly significant change - how so is a much more difficult question.