We investigate the valuation consequences of voluntary proposals to sell part or all of a corporation's assets. For partial sell-offs, successful sellers and buyers reap statistically significant abnormal returns of 1.66% and 0.83%, respectively. Unsuccessful sellers realize gains at the bid announcement of 1.41% that are lost at the offer termination. In contrast, proposals to liquidate the firm are associated with significant average abnormal returns of 12.24%. We interpret these findings as evidence that asset sales are associated with the movement of resources to higher-valued uses rather than as evidence of market mispricing before the divestiture announcements.

Common stock price reactions to announcements of 67 calls of in‐the‐money convertible preferred stocks are examined, and a significant average abnormal return of −1.6 percent is documented. The finding is robust to the choice of estimation period and the assumed return‐generating process. Annual dividend obligations for the called preferred issues in the sample typically are greater than the dividends for the common shares into which they are converted, and announcement‐period abnormal returns are negatively correlated with changes in dividends. Moreover, calls that result in dilution of voting rights appear to have greater adverse valuation effects than calls that do not alter voting rights concentration.

Eric L. Mais, William T. Moore, Ronald C. Rogers, A Re-Examination of Shareholder Wealth Effects of Calls of Convertible Preferred Stock, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 44, No. 5 (Dec., 1989), pp. 1401-1410