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During the height of the financial/credit crisis of 2008, the US Internal Revenue Service issued temporary guidance that permits REITs (real estate investment trusts) to retain cash and pay “effective stock dividends” through 2009 to meet their income distribution requirement. The purpose of this study is to investigate the policy implications of this guidance on shareholders' wealth and the intra‐industry effects for non‐event, rival REITs when event REITs announced elective stock dividends.

This study identified the announcements of the Revenue Procedures 2008‐68 and 2009‐15 and subsequent six equity REITs announcing the distribution of effective stock dividends in the first quarter of 2009. To assess their implications, this study adopted the event study methodology and multivariate regressions to examine the REIT price reactions and their distribution to the Revenue Procedure announcements and to the elective stock dividend announcements, respectively.

The Revenue Procedure announcements have positive wealth effects on the entire REIT market and REITs with higher leverage enjoy larger abnormal returns. During firm stock dividend announcement windows, non‐event, rival REITs have higher positive price reactions when the event firm and the non‐event firm are not alike and their returns have a low correlation coefficient, when the event firm has a large negative abnormal price reaction, and when the event firm pays cash/stock dividends in the mixture of 40 percent:60 percent, instead of 10 percent:90percent.

The results will help REIT investors to make better decisions. This study produces important implications for investors to pick REITs which are likely to experience higher returns at periods of turmoil when announcements about dividend policy changes are expected.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study looking into intra‐industry effects of REIT dividend announcements and the policy implications of the elective REIT stock dividends permitted by the US Internal Revenue Service. The results of this study show that the informational signals associated with these announcement events are rich and have intra‐industry implications on REIT share prices.

The purpose of this paper is to examine market reactions to private equity placements and intra-industry information spillover effects in the Taiwan Stock Exchange.

The authors first use the market model to compute the abnormal announcement returns. To examine the joint impact of the private investment in public equity (PIPE) purposes and the lead investor industry, the authors regress the issuers’ cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) on the dummy variables of PIPE purposes and the lead investor industry. To study the spillover effects, the authors regress the rivals’ CARs on the issuers’ CARs, PIPE purposes, and the lead investor industry. Finally, the industry Herfindahl index is used as a proxy for the market power of issuers and rivals to examine its impact on the spillover effects.

The authors find that issuing firms experience positive abnormal returns during the announcement period. Issuers enjoy more positive market reactions when the proceeds of offerings are primarily used to establish a long-term strategic alliance or to integrate business and when the lead investor is in the same industry. Furthermore, the authors show that the contagion effect dominates the competitive effect in private equity placements at the aggregate level. At the subsample level, the authors find competitive effect overpowers contagion effect when the purpose of offerings is primarily used to establish a long-term strategic alliance or to integrate business and when the lead investor is in the different industry. Finally, the authors show that rivals with relative lower market power enjoy more positive contagion effects.

First, the analysis documents the simultaneous importance of both the purposes of private offerings and the lead investor’s industry on announcement reactions, which shed new light on the positive abnormal returns during the announcement period. Second, the study adds to the literature on the information spillover effects by analyzing the role played by purposes of offerings and rivals’ market power. This paper provides a more complete picture of the offsetting competitive and contagion effects.

Given the public availability of secondary data on investments in events such as the Olympics, FIFA World Cup and professional sports, event studies that measure stock market response to these investments have grown. Previous findings are mixed, however, with some studies suggesting that the announcement of sponsorship contracts is a positive event and others finding detrimental effects of the announcement on shareholder value. This study aims to analyze the mixed findings from event studies in sport sponsorship to determine if sponsorship announcements influence stock market response.

The meta-analysis examines more than 20 years of research on event studies in sponsorship (34 studies).

The overall results show a positive, but non-significant effect of partnership deal announcements on shareholder wealth. Further analysis considers the effects of sponsorship announcements by each type of event window to see the impact of the announcement relative to time (pre-announcement, announcement day, post-announcement and pre- to post-announcement). This closer examination of the event window shows that stock prices of sponsoring organizations increased in the pre-announcement window.

Quantitative meta-analytic findings indicate that information about sponsorship deals appears to leak to share markets and positively influence share price. This finding suggests that sponsoring the sports and events found in these event studies is seen as value enhancing for sponsoring firms.

This paper aims to analyze the effects on shareholder value caused by the announcement of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) by real estate firms from 12 European countries.

A 4-factor model event study is conducted to assess the impact of SEO announcements on firm value. Additionally, a cross-sectional regression is run to identify factors that aggravate or mitigate the documented announcement effects.

Significant wealth losses of −1 per cent are found on the announcement day of an SEO. However, firms with good corporate governance and a low probability of overinvesting experience less negative announcement effects.

The present study considers equity financing. In this context, investors seem to thoroughly assess the implications of capital increases by looking at quality indicators. For firms with good corporate governance, management incentivizing mechanisms and a lower probability of overinvesting, shareholders’ trust in the management mitigates the bad signal that the announcement of an SEO usually conveys.

The finding of corporate governance as a value enhancing factor in the context of equity offerings, even during periods of financial turmoil, is reassuring to both managers and regulators.

The wealth effect of accelerated stock repurchase (ASR) documented by previous studies is not as large as the authors would have expected. The authors believe that there are potentially important sampling problems in the previous studies, which make the results less reliable. Identifying a number of factors that can possibly affect the announcement-period returns, the purpose of this paper is to reexamine the wealth effect of ASRs.

The paper identifies a number of factors that can possibly affect the announcement-period returns to ASRs which include: whether an ASR announcement in the press is the initiation date or the completion date of the ASR; the size of the ASR program; whether an ASR is part of an open market repurchase (OMR) program; the frequency of ASR announcements by a firm; whether other corporate news is announced simultaneously with an ASR. The paper partitions the ASR sample into three groups, and then examines the wealth effect of these groups.

The empirical results show that the market reacts differently to the announcement of ASR in these three groups. The three-day announcement-period CAR (t=−1, +1) is 3.59 percent for the high-wealth-effect group, 2.01 percent for the medium-wealth-effect group, and 1.48 percent for the low-wealth-effect group. The paper also identifies the size of the ASR program, whether the ASR is announced simultaneously with an OMR or not, and the frequency of ASR announcements are the most important determinants of the announcement-period abnormal returns.

These findings suggest that the weaker wealth effects of ASRs that have been documented in previous studies are due to sampling related issues.

We investigate global competitors’ reaction to the Citicorp–Travelers mega merger announcement and find that global competitors, especially banks in Europe and the US, reacted positively to the Citicorp and Travelers’ merger announcement. The uncertainties created by the investigations into the merger proposal had significant impact on the competitors’ stock price. The announcement that the merger had been consummated also elicited a significantly positive reaction from the rivals following the resolution of uncertainties emanating from the regulatory challenges. The positive reaction by competitors suggests that the merger was a wealth-creating event for the large firms in the financial services industry. The expected benefits outweighed any competitive effects resulting from the merger. The competitors’ reaction was, however, not homogenous. Our cross-sectional analysis shows that the abnormal returns earned by the competitors were higher the larger the competitor. In addition, the abnormal returns were greater for the US rivals. That the global competitors reacted positively to the Citicorp–Travelers mega merger announcement is consistent with our assertion that the merger had ramifications that go beyond regulatory concerns in the US.

This study aims to examine whether announcements of mandatory sustainability disclosure affect corporate sustainability performance (CSP).

The authors use a quasi-experiment provided by mandatory sustainability disclosure announcements that occurred in 21 countries from 2006–2016. A difference-in-differences method is adopted. The authors restrict the drawing of all candidate treatment and control firms to a pool of firms that did not disclose sustainability information one year before the announcements.

The authors find that the announcements of mandatory sustainability disclosure are positively related to CSP. The positive effect is more pronounced for firms in countries with higher anticipation effects and lower awareness effects. Specifically, the authors find that the effect of the announcements is more pronounced in a country where the rule of law is higher and stakeholders are less likely to initiate communication about sustainability with firms, and with fewer active participants in and signatories to the United Nations Global Compact initiative. The findings hold under different robustness analyses.

The study enriches the knowledge about the effect of the announcements of comprehensive mandatory sustainability disclosure by analysing the consequences of these announcements. In the contribution to this growing stream of research, the authors provide evidence on the consequences of the announcements based on a cross-country sample and importantly, focusses on the non-economic consequences.

Using data from a retail chain of 193 bakery shops that underwent downsizing, we study the effects of two types of downsizing announcements – closure or sale to another operator – on sales in the affected shops, and how these effects are moderated by job security perceptions. On average, sales in the affected shops go down by 26% after a closure announcement and by 7% after a sale announcement. Sales decline more sharply in shops where employees had higher job security perceptions before the announcement. Our findings are consistent with psychological contract theory: a breach of an implicit contract promising job security in exchange for work effort results in a reciprocal effort withdrawal. We rule out several alternative explanations to our findings.

This study aims to examine the industry reaction as determined by stock returns when firms in the electric services industry announced receipt of Going concern audit opinions from 1984 through 1991.

The study utilizes standard event study methodology to test for significant excess performance.

From 1984 to 1991, going concern opinion (GCO) announcements produce a contagion response in the industry on the announcement date more than half the time. Also, over the event window of the announcement date plus the five days following, six of the seven announcements were accompanied by significant negative industry reaction. Regression analysis suggests non‐announcing a firm's leverage and earnings correlation with the announcing firm significantly impact abnormal returns, as does the exchange on which the announcer's equity is traded, the size of the announcing firm and whether nuclear plant problems were mentioned in the announcement.

The findings suggest that audit opinions provide new information for investors in the electric services industry. Also, GCO announcements in this industry normally result in contagion among rival firms.

This paper provides insights into investor reactions to news contained in Going concern audit opinions in the electric services industry.

Research on mergers has made considerable progress over the last 50 years and has produced a vast body of literature, especially in the developed markets of the world. Little is known about the effect of announcements of mergers on shareholder wealth in the Indian context. Also unknown is the apparent influence of the market for corporate control on such wealth effects. The purpose of this paper is to fill gaps in this knowledge.

The study uses a standard event study method and statistically analyses share price and other secondary data.

It was found that the acquired firm shareholders enjoy significant wealth gains of 11.6 per cent in a 21‐day event window period, whereas the acquiring and combined firm shareholders do not do so. Mergers that do not see transfer of corporate control bestow significant wealth gains of 21.1 per cent on announcement on the target firm shareholders, whereas those where such a transfer takes place do not witness such gains.

One of the limitations of the study is the period. This study, a part of research covering a larger gamut of issues, necessitated the restriction of the time to the seven‐year 1996‐2002 timeline. The sample size of 34 usable, finally merged pairs of firms may appear limited, though several studies of this genre have used smaller sample sizes. However, the findings obtained are of value. The study points towards further research using a longer period that might help one to understand longitudinal variations in merger announcement effects on shareholder wealth. It also encourages future studies on several other factors which influence such effects.

The redistribution of shareholder wealth on merger announcement in India seems to be following a pattern similar to that found in many other studies, though the quantum of gains to the target shareholders is larger. Managers may also have to factor‐in the impact of the transfer of corporate control from the acquired to the acquiring firm on their assessment of shareholder wealth effects before announcing mergers.

The paper simultaneously adds to knowledge about wealth effects on merger announcement and the influence of the market for corporate control on this effect, in the Indian context.