Dissemination of Price-sensitive Information and Management of Voluntary Corporate Disclosure

This paper aims to describe how 27 large UK case companies sought to adapt their City and stock market disclosure policies to cope with the changes brought about by the publication in March 1994 of the Stock Exchange's Guidance on the Dissemination of Price-sensitive Information. Legislators and regulators have long sought to define and regulate the corporate decision problem in the price-sensitive information area. This paper employs corporate case interview data to describe models of corporate behaviour and to investigate how the case companies have dealt with this problem area. The paper concludes by (a), considering the effectiveness of regulation in providing a clear boundary for corporate behaviour, and (b), by discussing the relationship between this research and another major field study of corporate disclosure management (Gibbins, Richardson and Waterhouse, 1990), developing the disclosure model that they present.