"Managers have substantial discretion in when to announce earnings during the day. While the prior literature has shown that the timing of announcements during the day can affect the stock market's reaction to earnings news, there is either mixed or weak empirical evidence on why a manager chooses a certain time of the day to announce earnings. In this paper, I examine whether institutional ownership affects firms' decisions to announce earnings after hours (AH). AH are largely dominated by institutional investors who better understand the implications of earnings news for firm value and stock prices. I argue that firms with greater institutional ownership announce earnings AH to promote institutional investors' trading, and therefore facilitate post-announcement price discovery and reduce price volatility. Using the annual reconstitution of the Russell 1000 and 2000 indexes which provides plausibly exogenous variation in institutional ownership, I find that firms with higher institutional ownership are more likely to announce earnings during an aftermarket session (i.e., AH after the market closes), but not during a premarket session (i.e., AH before the market opens). My analysis further shows that transient institutional ownership has a stronger influence on the likelihood of after-market announcements relative to quasi-indexer and dedicated institutional holdings, and that the effect of institutional ownership on the announcement timing is more pronounced when firms have bad earnings news or large transitory earnings components. Lastly, I find that announcing earnings during an after-market session indeed facilitates the post-announcement price discovery and reduces price volatility for firms with greater institutional ownership. Collectively, my findings suggest that institutional ownership influences firms' earnings announcement timing decisions"--Pages vii-viii.

This study documents an association between changes in institutional ownership during a calendar quarter and abnormal returns at the time of subsequent announcements of quarterly earnings. The result is driven by the portfolio returns of the extreme deciles of changes in institutional ownership, suggesting that institutions trade based on information about future earnings, but that such trading is not widespread. We also find that the difference between earnings announcement returns of the extreme deciles of change in institutional ownership is much greater when change in institutional ownership of a stock is driven by relatively few institutions, measured using the skewness of the distribution of change in institutional ownership of the stock. This result suggests that when fewer differentially informed investors make disproportionately large purchases or sales of stocks, a greater amount of the information on which they base their trades is not impounded in prices until the subsequent earnings announcement. Finally, we show that our results obtain for institutional investors with short-term focus, such as independent advisors, investment companies and insurance companies, but not for institutional investors with long-term focus, such as internally managed pension funds, educational institutions, and private foundations. This result further supports our conclusions regarding informed trading by institutions based on information about forthcoming earnings.

This paper empirically examines the incremental relation between trading volume surrounding quarterly earnings announcements and institutional holdings. Consistent with Cready (1988) and Lee (1992), we find a significant positive relation between abnormal trading volume and the fraction of institutional ownership during the period immediatly following an earnings announcement, after controlling for the magnitude of the associated price reaction and the dispersion of analysts' EPS forecasts.

Dividend policy continues to be among the premier unsolved puzzles in finance. A number of theories have been advanced to explain dividend policy. This e-book briefly reviews the principal theories of payout policy and dividend policy and summarizes the empirical evidence on these theories. Empirical evidence is equivocal and the search for new explanation for dividends continues.

We investigate whether and how an exogenous and unprecedented improvement in the quality of non-U.S. firms' financial reporting affects post-earnings-announcement drift (PEAD). We find that PEAD declines after the information shock, and the decrease is more pronounced among firms with fewer concurrent earnings announcements, higher institutional holdings, and lower limits-to-arbitrage, and in countries with stronger enforcement. In addition, the decrease in PEAD is primarily driven by firms with greater changes in financial reporting, and an increase in analyst forecast accuracy, institutional ownership, and liquidity. Taken together, these findings support the mispricing explanation of PEAD in an international setting.