ASU Scholarship Showcase

Using a natural experiment (Regulation SHO), we show that short selling pressure and consequent stock price behavior have a causal effect on managers’ voluntary disclosure choices. Specifically, we find that managers respond to a positive exogenous shock to short selling pressure and price sensitivity to bad news by reducing the precision of bad news forecasts. This finding on management forecasts appears to be generalizable to other corporate disclosures. In particular, we find that, in response to increased short selling pressure, managers also reduce the readability (or increase the fuzziness) of bad news annual reports. Overall, our results suggest that maintaining the current level of stock prices is an important consideration in managers’ strategic disclosure decisions.

Chapter from the ACRL book Toxic Dynamics: Disrupting, Dismantling, and Transforming Academic Library Culture. This chapter provides a bit of background on punk and libraries, identifies some toxic library cultures, and then suggests concrete ways for library workers to disrupt these cultures while maintaining boundaries that are regularly violated in library work.