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The study's purpose is to examine market returns around dividend announcements that contrast with a pattern of prior dividend announcements.

The paper identifies firms that have a smooth dividend pattern of once-a-year dividend increases but at some point break that pattern and announce an unchanged dividend. The sample design allows the opportunity to investigate the market reaction to unchanged dividend announcements when an increase was likely to have been expected.

The results indicate that failing to increase the dividend is associated with significantly positive abnormal returns that are greater in magnitude for more entrenched dividend-increase records, supporting a contrast-effect hypothesis.

The results indicate that dividends are interpreted not only relative to the immediate dividend amount but also how the decision contrasts with dividends over a prolonged period. This finding suggests that the information content of the announcement of an unchanged dividend can vary according to the prior dividend pattern.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the effect of management earnings forecasts on the level of information asymmetry around subsequent earnings announcement.

Employing the adverse selection cost method suggested by George et al., the paper compares for each sample firm the adverse selection cost around earnings announcement in forecasting years with that in non‐forecasting years.

Consistent with Diamond and Verrecchia is the finding that the earnings announcement in non‐forecasting years decreases information asymmetry during a three‐day announcement period and increases in a post‐announcement period up to seven days. No significant change in information asymmetry between pre‐ and post‐announcement periods when firms released a “good” news forecast is found. The firms that previously released a “bad” news forecast experience a significantly lower information asymmetry than those that did not forecast during announcement or post‐announcement days, and experience a decrease in information asymmetry in a five to seven‐day post‐announcement period.

This paper provides the first empirical reports on the different information asymmetry changes around earnings announcements followed by a “good” news management forecast from those followed by a “bad” news forecast.

In a recent article Aharony and Swary considered the synchronous nature of earnings and dividends announcements in examination of the information content of dividend hypothesis. They concluded that their results support the information content of dividends hypothesis—that announcements of changes in dividends provide information beyond that contained in quarterly earnings announcements. A shortcoming of the Aharony and Swary study is that it considers only dividend and earnings announcements that occur at least 11 trading days from each other. In fact, as their Table I indicates the majority of such pairs of announcements occur within ten days of each other. Further, approximately one‐half of their observations of earnings and dividends announcements are separated by at least 21 trading days (close to one calendar month). These considerations lead one to wonder how synchronous their announcements are and whether their results can be generalized to earnings and dividend announcements that actually occur in close proximity to each other.

The effect of layoff announcements on the shareholder returns of 154 firms that announced layoffs in 1993‐1994 was examined with event study methodology. As expected, the returns to these firms were negative. Further, the returns to the firms that announced layoffs for “reactive” reasons were more negative than the returns to the firms that announced layoffs for “proactive” reasons. The effect of employment guarantee announcements on the shareholder returns of 13 firms that announced employment guarantees in 1993‐1994 and on the returns of 63 firms that made similar announcements throughout the 1990 s was examined. Returns of these samples also responded negatively to the announcements. When the response to the two types of announcements was compared, however, there was no clear conclusion regarding which type of announcement drew a more negative response.

The regulations concerning preliminary profit announcements are contained in the Listing Rules of the Stock Exchange. The disclosure provisions are modest and there is no requirement for the document to be audited. There have been criticisms concerning the ambiguity of the auditors’ involvement and the timing of the release of information for a number of years. Amendments introduced in 1993 have done little to resolve the matter. As an empirical study of 148 randomly selected listed companies, seeks answers to the following three questions: Does the audit status have any relationship with the size or type of company? Is the audit status associated with the timing of the release of information? Is the audit status associated with the voluntary provision of additional financial statements? Concludes that there is considerable variety in company practice and that the Stock Exchange should take action to dispel the ambiguities concerning auditors’ involvement with preliminary profit announcements.

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 analysis is the first to explore the overall roles of the offsetting attraction and distraction influences of earnings news in shaping the level of attention given to the equity market by market participants.

We use multivariate regression approach and examine how trading activity levels within the set of non-announcing firms varies with respect to collective measures of contemporaneous earnings announcement visibility. We employ attention and information transfer theories in our hypothesis development.

This analysis is the first to explore the overall roles of the offsetting attraction and distraction influences of earnings news in shaping the level of attention given to the equity market by market participants. Specifically, we examine how the number of earnings announcement activity affects investor attention as measured by trading volume given to the set of non-announcing firms. We find that while earnings announcement numbers lower trading volume responses to earnings news among announcing firms (consistent with Hirshleifer et al., 2009), their distractive influence does not carry over into the market as a whole. More importantly, investor attention to both the overall market and the larger subset of non-announcing firms increase in response to earnings news activity levels. However, after decomposing the announcers as same-industry and different-industry announcers, we find that investor attention to the non-announcing segment of the market increases with the number of same-industry announcers, but actually seems to decrease (i.e. they distract attention) with the number of different-industry announcers. We also find that the associated earnings surprise brings attention to non-announcing firms (consistent with earnings news is relevant to overall market price movements). Finally, we find that distraction effects are attenuated in the financial crisis period.

A promising area of future research is to examine the relation between market pricing efficiency and aggregate earnings activity for the set of non-announcing firms. Although it will be a challenging task to measure pricing efficiency for the non-announcers, this will complement the prior literature only focusing on the announcing segment of the market.

First, instead of assessing the impact of number of earnings announcements on the subset of announcing firms, which is a micro-level perspective, we identify the impact of news arrivals on all firms in the market including the vastly larger set of non-announcing firms. Second, by decomposing the number of announcements into industry-related and -unrelated news we show that different types of news arrivals spark investor attention differently, suggesting the importance of categorizing the news into related and unrelated industries.

A potential future area of research identified by our analysis is to investigate what type of investors' attention is distracted or attracted during the earnings announcements. A promising area of future research is to examine the relation between market pricing efficiency and aggregate earnings activity for the set of non-announcing firms.

This paper is the first one exploring the overall roles of the offsetting attraction and distraction influences of earnings announcements in shaping the level of investor attention given to the equity market by market participants. Our findings should be of interest to investors, analysts, security market regulators and researchers.

This paper aims to investigate the consequences of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on information asymmetry in the banking sector. Specifically, the authors look at whether specific firm or deal characteristic influence information asymmetry levels between insiders and investors, as well as the impact of recent regulation such as the Dodd–Frank Act.

The authors decompose the M&A process into three periods (pre-announcement, negotiation and post-completion period) and document changes in the information asymmetry levels between insiders and investors through the M&A process. The authors capture changes in information asymmetry using six different spread-based information asymmetry measures.

The authors find evidence that information asymmetry increases following M&A announcement and decreases following deal completion. These findings are more pronounced for acquisitions involving a private target, all-cash deals and for mergers, as opposed to acquisition of assets. We find that overall, successful mergers improve the quality of the information environment, while failed deals degrade it. Additionally, the enactment of Dodd–Frank reduced the magnitude of the changes in information asymmetry during the M&A process. The results are important to regulators, policy makers and investors.

To authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that looks at the effect of bank M&As on information asymmetry as well as the effect of regulations on information asymmetry.

This paper aims to revisit the extant evidence on gender bias in the market. Specifically, it revisits reaction to CEO announcements. Also, it explores whether the development of the bias over time and by firm size aligns with existing theory.

The paper examines cumulative abnormal returns around CEO announcements from 1992 through 2016 using a modified event study methodology. This evidence shown examines market reactions over time and by firm size.

Financial markets react more favorably to male CEO announcements, with a cumulative abnormal return of 49 basis points above the reaction to their female counterparts. Moreover, the paper finds that market reaction varies over time, which may be because of the increasing proportion of female CEOs, and by firm size, which may be due to the differences in new information available to investors.

Limitations include sample size due to the paucity of female CEO announcements. This paper does not examine the effect of industry, detailed CEO characteristics or announcement content on market reaction. In addition, using an extended event window may increase the likelihood of capturing confounding events, such as mergers or earnings announcements, which limits the interpretability of the results.

Gender bias in financial markets creates another institutional barrier for the advancement of female professionals, as well as implies inefficient capital allocation in markets.

The literature in this field is still inconclusive. Furthermore, bias development over time and the effect of information on bias remain unexplored. This study aims to fill that gap; furthermore, it introduces an extended event-window approach.

This paper explores dividend announcements based on information hypothesis. We explore in particular whether or not information signaling theory existed in Taiwan. We also explore the free cash flow hypothesis. In order to eliminate affecting factors, we target companies with irregular dividends as research samples, just like those with specially designated dividends (SDD). We examine whether or not those proceeds may be deemed as future earnings prospection. In this paper we study mainly dividend announcements made during stockholder’s meetings of the companies listed in the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE) or R.O.C. Over-the-Counter Securities Exchange (ROSE). We apply event study as means of analyzing abnormal returns of the companies. In addition we use the GARCH model with traditional ordinary least square to estimate the market model. The results indicate that SDDs are considered positive signals by the national exchange, TSE. In addition, we also show that the first-time SDD does transmit a positive signal to the market regarding the firm’s future cash flow, and that the SDD of no payment in the previous three years is negative. Furthermore, we prove that low Q firms have greater market reaction than high Q firms in announcement period. The free cash flow hypothesis and firm size effects could not be verified in Taiwan.