We document substantial long-run post-issue underperformance by firms making straight and convertible debt offerings from 1975 to 1989. This long-run underperformance is more severe for smaller, younger, and NASDAQ-listed firms, and for firms issuing speculative grade debt. We also find strong evidence that the underperformance of issuers of both straight and convertible debt is limited to those issues that occur in periods with a high volume of issues. In contrast to earlier event studies that found insignificantly negative abnormal returns at the time of debt issue announcements and concluded that debt offerings had no impact on shareholder wealth, our results suggest that debt offerings, like equity offerings, are signals that the firm is overvalued. As with equity offerings and repurchases, the market appears to underreact at the time of the debt offering announcement so that the full impact of the offering is only realized over a longer time horizon.

We document that firms making seasoned equity offerings during 1975–1989 substantially underperformed a sample of matched firms from the same industry and of similar size that did not issue equity. This underperformance persists even after controlling for trading system, offer size, and the issuing firm's age and book-to-market ratio. It is similar to that previously documented for initial public offerings, suggesting that managers take advantage of overvaluation in both the initial and seasoned equity offering markets.

We investigate the relation between the Value Line enigma and post-earnings-announcement drift. The ability of Value Line's ‘timeliness’ ranks to predict future abnormal returns is well-documented. However, we show that most rank changes occur within eight trading days of an earnings announcement. Once we control for post-earnings-announcement drift, differences in abnormal returns across Value Line timeliness ranks are no longer significant. Moreover, we find that timeliness ranks have no predictive power for firms with small earnings ‘surprises’. We conclude that the Value Line enigma is a manifestation of post-earnings-announcement drift.