A Measure of Management’s Withholding of Bad News

European Accounting Review (Forthcoming)

61 Pages Posted: 25 Jun 2016 Last revised: 22 Sep 2023

See all articles by Vasiliki E. Athanasakou

Vasiliki E. Athanasakou

Saint Mary's University, Canada - Sobey School of Business

Martin Walker

The University of Manchester - Manchester Business School

Date Written: September 1, 2021

Abstract

We develop a measure of management’s withholding of bad news (NBF—net bad flows) based on the relative lumpiness of negative daily abnormal stock returns in the fiscal period. We present an extensive set of tests that support the construct validity of NBF as a measure of management’s bad news withholding. Being calculable for listed companies using daily stock return data, NBF can complement direct scores of corporate disclosures when assessing the overall quality of corporate financial communication. We also compare the properties of NBF with the properties of measures of crash risk. We find that NBF outperforms traditional crash risk measures in capturing bad news withholding. Re-estimating the crash risk measures using daily instead of weekly stock returns yields more powerful proxies for bad news withholding that are more closely related to NBF.

Keywords: bad news withholding; financial communication; information quality; disclosure.

JEL Classification: G20; G30; M40; M41

Suggested Citation

Athanasakou, Vasiliki E. and Walker, Martin, A Measure of Management’s Withholding of Bad News (September 1, 2021). European Accounting Review (Forthcoming), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2799681 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2799681

Vasiliki E. Athanasakou (Contact Author)

Saint Mary's University, Canada - Sobey School of Business ( email )

Sobey Building 311
923 Robie Street
Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 3C3
Canada

Martin Walker

The University of Manchester - Manchester Business School ( email )

Booth Street West
Manchester, M15 6PB
United Kingdom

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