This study examines the unintended effects of a pre-Reg FD practice that gave a broad group of sophisticated market participants 15-minute earlier access to all corporate press releases than the ...general public. We find that roughly one-eighth of the price discovery to earnings announcements issued during regular trading hours was due to privileged access to information in earnings press releases, with the 15-minute priority dissemination contributing to just over 50 percent of price discovery from all privileged access. In addition, we find that transient institutions benefited from priority dissemination, especially when the earnings contained good news. Finally, consistent with economic theory, we find that intraday bid-ask spreads decreased post-Reg FD for firms that had sufficient market liquidity to allow trading opportunities during the 15-minute window. Our study has implications for current discussions on whether preferential information distribution by firms and information intermediaries creates an uneven playing field among investors.
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•The change in the displacement of the pump depended on the pressure inside the chamber.•The modified valve showed better performance compared to the original one due to the small ...stiffness and higher opening area.•The pressure profiles followed driving waveform at low frequency, and changed to the sinusoidal waveform at high frequency.•Vortex generated inside the valve port immediately disappeared, because the flow is in the vortex extinction regime.
This study analyzed the characteristics of a small reciprocating pump with a reed valve driven by a piezo actuator. Two types of valves were fabricated and the effect of valve shape on the pump performance was investigated. The flow rate variation with the frequency was measured. The flow rate increased with the driving frequency until a certain frequency then started decreasing. There was a change in the flow rate increase at the resonance frequency of the piston membrane. Pressure fluctuations generated by pump operation play a significant role in determining the flow pattern. In particular, the valve stiffness and fluid inertia were found to be the major parameters for pressure waveform. The flow pattern of the outlet valve port was analyzed using the visualization technique. The flow pattern changed depending on the shape of the valve and driving waveform. The arm valve produced higher flow velocity than that of the cantilever valve. The flow behavior inside the valve port provided the comprehensive relationship to the effect of the valve shape on the pump performance.
Numerous studies indicate that civil society organizations create cultural change by deploying mainstream messages that resonate with prevailing discursive themes. Yet these case studies of highly ...influential organizations obscure the much larger population that have little or no impact. It is therefore unclear whether civil society organizations create cultural change by deploying mainstream discourses or if they become part of the mainstream because of their success. I present an evolutionary theory of how discursive fields settle after major historical ruptures that highlights framing, social networks, and emotional energy. To illustrate this theory, I use plagiarism detection software to compare 1,084 press releases about Muslims produced by 120 civil society organizations to 50,407 newspaper articles and television transcripts produced between 2001 and 2008. Although most organizations deployed pro-Muslim discourses after the September 11th attacks, I show that anti-Muslim fringe organizations dominated the mass media via displays of fear and anger. Institutional amplification of this emotional energy, I argue, created a gravitational pull or "fringe effect" that realigned inter-organizational networks and altered the contours of mainstream discourse itself.
How do firms repair their reputations after a serious accounting restatement? To answer this question, we review firms' press releases and identify 1,765 reputation-building actions taken by: (1) 94 ...restating firms in the periods before and after their restatement; and (2) a set of matched control firms during contemporaneous periods. We posit that firms have incentives to target multiple stakeholders in a reputation repair strategy—including capital providers, customers, employees, and geographic communities—and that actions targeting each group generate positive market returns as reputation capital is repaired. Consistent with our predictions, the frequency of, and stock returns to, reputation-building actions are greater for restating firms in the period after their restatement than for the control groups. In addition, firm characteristics predict the types of stakeholders targeted by firms. Finally, actions targeted at both capital providers and other stakeholders are associated with improvements in the restating firm's financial reporting credibility.
Conference calls held in conjunction with an earnings release have become increasingly common in recent years, yet there is little evidence regarding the reasons that these calls are incrementally ...informative over the accompanying press release. Using a sample of more than 10,000 conference-call transcripts, we examine the information content of both segments of the call—the presentation and the discussion segment. We find that both segments have incremental information content over the accompanying press release. However, discussion periods are relatively more informative than presentation periods, and this greater information content is positively associated with analyst following. We also find that managers provide increased disclosures during the presentation segment when firm performance is poor, but relatively more information is released during discussion periods in these circumstances. Overall, our results are consistent with the notion that active analyst involvement in conference calls increases the information content of the calls, particularly when firm performance is poor.
This article documents two facts that are provocative in juxtaposition. First: There is multidecade durability of theory controversies in psychology, demonstrated here in the subdisciplines of ...cognitive and social psychology. Second: There is a much greater frequency of Nobel science awards for contributions to method than for contributions to theory, shown here in an analysis of the last two decades of Nobel awards in physics, chemistry, and medicine. The available documentation of Nobel awards reveals two forms of method-theory synergy: (a) existing theories were often essential in enabling development of awarded methods, and (b) award-receiving methods often generated previously inconceivable data, which in turn inspired previously inconceivable theories. It is easy to find illustrations of these same synergies also in psychology. Perhaps greater recognition of the value of method in advancing theory can help to achieve resolutions of psychology's persistent theory controversies.
Congressional districts create two levels of representation. Studies of representation focus on a disaggregated level: the electoral connection between representatives and constituents. But there is ...a collective level of representation—the result of aggregating across representatives. This article uses new measures of home styles to demonstrate that responsiveness to constituents can have negative consequences for collective representation. The electoral connection causes marginal representatives—legislators with districts composed of the other party's partisans—to emphasize appropriations in their home styles. But it causes aligned representatives—those with districts filled with copartisans—to build their home styles around position taking. Aggregated across representatives, this results in an artificial polarization in stated party positions: aligned representatives, who tend to be ideologically extreme, dominate policy debates. The logic and evidence in this article provide an explanation for the apparent rise in vitriolic debate, and the new measures facilitate a literature on home styles.
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have facilitated an explosion of interest in Bayesian methods. MCMC is an incredibly useful and important tool but can face difficulties when used to estimate ...complex posteriors or models applied to large data sets. In this paper, we show how a recently developed tool in computer science for fitting Bayesian models, variational approximations, can be used to facilitate the application of Bayesian models to political science data. Variational approximations are often much faster than MCMC for fully Bayesian inference and in some instances facilitate the estimation of models that would be otherwise impossible to estimate. As a deterministic posterior approximation method, variational approximations are guaranteed to converge and convergence is easily assessed. But variational approximations do have some limitations, which we detail below. Therefore, variational approximations are best suited to problems when fully Bayesian inference would otherwise be impossible. Through a series of examples, we demonstrate how variational approximations are useful for a variety of political science research. This includes models to describe legislative voting blocs and statistical models for political texts. The code that implements the models in this paper is available in the supplementary material.
This study aims to assess COVID-related communication by Swiss public health institutions (PHI) as well as the challenges they faced in implementing their communication strategies.
This study uses a ...two-part mixed methods design, combining automated content analysis of press releases by PHI and semi-structured interviews with PHI communication experts.
The automated content analysis uses natural language processing techniques to measure semantic themes and linguistic properties of 1882 press releases from national and regional PHI during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The semi-structured interviews with 25 communication experts from key PHI explore the challenges faced in implementing their communication strategies.
The content analysis reveals key themes in press releases, including non-pharmaceutical interventions, quarantine, testing, contact tracing, hospital situations, and the pandemic's impact on the economy. The linguistic measures indicated a decrease in complexity and readability over time, with no significant differences between national and regional PHI. Interviews revealed challenges arising from organizational structures, the multi-systemic nature of the pandemic, and from expectations of the public.
The study highlights the importance of agility in public health communication and the need for efficient coordination within and between PHI. Organizational structures should be adapted to allow for more agile modes of operation during crises. Policymakers should clarify roles and responsibilities of different actors in public health frameworks to ensure streamlined communication. Understanding the communication efforts and challenges faced by PHI during the pandemic helps preparing for future health crises and improve public health communication practices.
The Central Bank uses press releases after board meetings for at least three purposes: first, to justify policy measures based on the economic situation; second, to provide some forward guidance ...signals to agents; and third, to supply some further (latent) information to the markets. This article involves a reading analysis of press releases based on a machine-learning technique to show, first, the coherence between communications and the changes of the interest rate and, second, the capacity of communications to alter inflation expectations. We find that, following the official mandate of the Central Bank, inflation and inflation expectations as well as economic activity were significant topics in the adoption of policy measures between September 2004 and March 2016, with more emphasis on the former. Our indicators of forward guidance are not significant in the adoption of contemporary policy measures. Finally, with the help of latent semantic analysis, we extract the underlying factors that are then used in structural VAR models to identify and measure the impact of press releases’ shocks on inflation expectations. Our results indicate that Colombia's Central Bank uses communications as a monetary policy tool and that this strategy influences market inflation expectations.
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