THE WEEKEND EFFECT AND CORPORATE DIVIDEND ANNOUNCEMENTS

Numerous studies document a day-of-the-week effect in stock returns. Although a common explanation for this phenomenon concerns a potential daily pattern in the release of corporate information, existing studies provide conflicting evidence. To aid in resolving this issue, possible seasonalities in a sample of 138,824 dividend announcements are investigated over twenty-six years across 3,484 firms. Tests provide no support for the information hypothesis and suggest that the anomalous pattern of returns is driven by some factor unrelated to information arrivals.