A surprise: Companies don't manipulate news timing

Stephen Oberbeck of the Salt Lake Tribune writes Sunday about academic research that concludes that most companies do not wait until the end of the day or the end of the week to release bad news.

Oberbeck writes, “Yet a new study by researchers Matthew Magilke of the University of Utah and Jeffrey T. Doyle of Utah State University casts doubt on that axiom and suggests corporate managers aren’t being nearly as devious as some suppose.

“‘There is this sneaking suspicion out there that corporate managers sit around their board rooms and try to influence their company’s share price by timing the release of their bad news,’ said Magilke, an assistant professor of accounting in the U. of U.’s David Eccles School of Business. ‘But we didn’t find any smoking gun’ suggesting that is the case.

“Magilke and Doyle’s study, ‘The Timing of Earnings Announcements: An Examination of the Strategic Disclosure Hypotheses,’ was published in The Accounting Review in January.”

Read more here.