A Study on the Effects of Mandatory Disclosure Changes in the Oil and Gas Industry on Stock Prices and Firm Values

This research focuses on the oil and gas industries mandatory disclosures required by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2010. The industry has had no disclosure changes in twenty years. This quantitative study is looking to determine if this event had an impact on the stock price and the firm value, using multiple variables regression will be used. Multivariable regression analysis paying close attention to the ANOVA test; this will be used to determine the overall fit of the data. The participants of the study where selected based on whether 1) the companies belong to the oil and gas industry; 2) they are found on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the NASDAQ and the American Stock Exchange; 3) their Initial Public Offering (IPO) must have been conducted prior to 2009, and 4) they must be amongst the top 110 firms on the basis of their market capitalization. Information can be accessed to the corporation's industry purpose; stock prices, asset values, equity values are accessible from the financial statements submitted to the SEC and the stock values available from the historical data of the NYSE, the NASDAQ and the American Stock Exchange. It was found that the mean stock price increased each defined period. The mean value in 2009, is 23.72405, in January 2010, the mean value is 30.3614, and one year after the mean value is 35.43091. The paired t-test was statistically significant with a p-value of 0.0001 < .05, and a p-value one year later of 0.0161 < .05. There was a strong correlation between the voluntary disclosure research and the findings in this research on mandatory disclosure. The average abnormal returns indicates that on the average, the abnormal returns on the date of the event were nearly 0.014351 while they were 0.032083937 one year after the event. The cumulative average abnormal return was 0.046435. These were statistically significant. The long-term assets did not yield the expected results. The weighted average did decrease over the selected periods and were statistically significant at .053.