Disclosure Media Research Articles

An Empirical Examination of Conference Calls as a Voluntary Disclosure Medium

An Empirical Examination of Conference Calls as a Voluntary Disclosure Medium

An Empirical Examination of Conference Calls as a Voluntary Disclosure Medium

This paper provides evidence on the characteristics of firms that hold conference calls and on whether these calls provide information to market participants. We find that firms that hold conference calls are larger, more profitable, go to the capital markets more often, and are growing more rapidly than other firms. We also find that conference calls provide information to market participants over and above the information contained in the accompanying press release. We find that trading volume and, to a lesser degree, return variance, are elevated during the time of conference calls and that average trade size is higher during the time of conference calls. We believe that this evidence is important because it suggests that material information is being released during conference calls and that a subset of large investors trade on this information in real time.

An Empirical Examination of Conference Calls as a Voluntary Disclosure Medium

Corporate conference calls are large-scale telephone conference calls during which managers make presentations to and answer questions from various market participants, usually about earnings. In this paper, we sample 1,056 corporate conference calls made by 808 firms during February-November 1995 to provide evidence on three questions: (1) whether conference calls provide information to stock market participants, (2) whether investors have equal access to the information provided during these calls, and (3) why managers of some firms hold conference calls while managers of other firms do not. We believe this research is important because managers' use of conference calls has grown enormously, yet we know little about how these calls affect investors.1

Support for campaign spending limitations in the U. S. senate: The role of party, ideology and electoral security

Recent media disclosures of American campaign funding raising practices in the 1996 election have renewed political interest in campaign finance reform. This paper examines senatorial support for the McCain/Feingold measure that would have established voluntary spending limits on senate candidates and banned unlimited campaign contributions through political party organizations. While party affiliation and senator ideology are very important in explaining support for the McCain/Feingold measure, various measures of electoral security are not significant. This is important because the public choice literature emphasizes that electoral security is the primary goal of legislators. Additionally, the electoral self-interest of legislators is probably much more accurately measured by the various electoral security measures used in this study than by the constituency measures typically employed in the public choice literature. Nevertheless, personal legislator electoral security is not a powerful explanatory factor.

Public interest reports as a medium for corporate disclosure: The case of General Motors

We examined the public interest reports of General Motors from 1971 to 1990 and presented the contents thereof herein. The principal areas disclosed by GM during those years that are discussed in this paper were minorities, women, and employment issues, energy and the environment, international operations, automotive safety, and philanthropic activity. The purpose of this study was to examine the public interest report as a vehicle through which a firm might disclose information in the public interest. We concluded that there were at least three principal forces driving GM's disclosures. They included public attention focused on, potential costs associated with, and the relative subjectivity of an issue.

Voluntary Disclosure Choice and Earnings Information Transfer

The purpose of this paper is to assess the relation between the incidence of earnings information transfer and managerial decisions to disclose earnings forecasts. We investigate whether forecasting firms receive lower magnitude earnings information transfers than nonforecasting firms. Previous studies suggest that annual earnings are not a timely disclosure medium (e.g., Ball and Brown [1968]) and that interim disclosures like quarterly announcements and management forecasts have information content for prices.1 Other studies document the existence of intraindustry information transfers associated with quarterly earnings2 and management forecasts.3 Collectively, this evidence suggests that investors condition their beliefs about a firm's earnings prospects on

Media and price disclosure effects in legal service advertising: A comparison of attorney and consumer attitudes

Media and price disclosure effects in legal service advertising: A comparison of attorney and consumer attitudes

Abnormal stock returns associated with media disclosures of ‘subject to’ qualified audit opinions

This paper contains evidence of a significant negative stock price reaction to media disclosures of ‘subject to’ qualified audit opinions. Disclosures of qualifications in the financial news media (the Wall Street Journal and the Broad Tape) are rare relative to the frequency of audit qualifications. Other studies do not detect an impact of qualified opinions on stock prices. None of the explanations for the difference in the results between this study and prior studies is consistent with the data. We are unable to draw strong inferences because we cannot identify the selection process that produces the sample of media disclosures.

Children: An Endangered Species

Children:An Endangered Species Nancy Tillman Fetz (bio) Neil Postman . The Disappearance of Childhood. New York: Delacorte, 1982. David Elkind . The Hurried Child; Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1981. Marie Winn . Children Without Childhood. New York: Pantheon, 1983. Since Phillippe Ariès in his influential Centuries of Childhood (1962) sought to demonstrate that the concept of childhood was a relatively recent invention of Western society, an abundance of works on the changing cultural meanings of childhood have appeared. "The history of childhood has now become a major industry among scholars," writes Neil Postman in The Disappearance of Childhood (1). He adds, however, that historians usually come not to praise but to bury, and that when we turn a cultural value into an object of nostalgia and contemplation it is a sure sign of that value's obsolescence. Postman, a professor of Media Ecology at New York University, advances the bold proposition that childhood as it has been known since the late seventeenth century is rapidly vanishing and probably won't be resurrected without major changes in our communication system. He asserts that the concept of childhood as a distinct period of life requiring special kinds of supervision and care arose with the printing press, which erected a knowledge barrier between those who could read (adults) and those who couldn't (children). With the rise of literacy came schools and schooling and a further defining of childhood as a separate stage of life with its own internal requirements. Literate adult society meanwhile collected an ever-richer content of secrets to be kept from the young; secrets about social and sexual relations, about money, violence, illness, and death. Postman contends that so long as adults could withhold such information they could also maintain a separateness from (and control over) children. But if ever the knowledge gap were to disappear, so would childhood. This gap has been all but closed by the mass media, Postman believes. Television —the "total disclosure medium" —is the primary culprit because it does not discriminate between viewers but offers up [End Page 91] "He really is getting smaller," said Treehorn's mother. "What will we do? What will people say?" "Why, they'll say he's getting smaller," said Treehorn's father. He thought for a moment. "I wonder if he's doing it on purpose. Just to be different." "Why would he want to be different?" asked Treehorn's mother. Treehorn started listening to the commercial. its fare to whoever is there to receive it. It is because children now have access to the previously hidden fruits of adult information that they have become more "adult-like," in Postman's words. Parallel to the "adultification" of children, adults have become "childified." That is, according to Postman, the very structure of television communication calls attention not to ideas but to images and sensations, conditioning us to respond emotionally (i.e., in a childlike way) and not rationally (i.e., as an adult would). Because television demands an immediate response to its ever-changing images and fragmented content, it renders us less capable of patient or thoughtful consideration of a subject, and we regress, so Postman would have us believe, to a childlike mentality. Everywhere Postman sees a merging of the activities and expressions of young and old. Children and adults now wear the same clothes, share the same tastes in entertainment, read the same books, play the same games, commit the same crimes. In extreme cases, parent and child reverse roles, as in several films —Paper Moon, Endless Love, A Little Romance, Irreconcilable Differences —in which the child plays the reassuring adult to a parent, or is put in the position of having to force the parent to grow up. In treating contemporary children's literature as another expression [End Page 92] of our altered concept of childhood, Postman's understanding is disappointingly superficial. He would have us set up the old battle lines between fantasy and realism: fairy tales as constructive, therapeutic tools preserving childhood vs. the so-called "new realism" —with Judy Blume in the forefront of the forces of bad influence. Postman's mechanical, either/or viewpoint culminates in the...

Disclosure and informed-consent: does it matter how we tell it?

Traditionally, informed consent has been handled by the physician in a one-to-one interchange with the patient. As standards for adequate disclosure become more rigid and demands on physician time increase, however, the physician-patient model may cease to be practical. This study evaluated four alterative disclosure models: a formal discussion, a videotape, a pamphlet, and an informal discussion, each designed and executed by a team of health educators. Study results suggest that the informed consent process is little affected by disclosure medium and that it may be possible to strive for cost-efficiency in disclosure without compromising the quality of the consent obtained. Based on these results, a two-part disclosure process is proposed which allocates certain aspects of the disclosure to the treating physician, others to health education.