With a grain of salt (Libgober et al 2026) | FT50 JAE

English Podcast starts at 00:00:00Bengali Podcast starts at 00:18:42Hindi Podcast starts at 00:33:27Danish Podcast starts at 00:47:55ReferenceLibgober, J., Michaeli, B., & Wiedman, E. (2025). With a grain of salt: Investor reactions to uncertain news and (Non)disclosure. Journal of Accounting and Economics, 101802. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacceco.2025.101802‌Youtube Channel⁠https://www.youtube.com/@weekendresearcher⁠Connect over linkedinhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/mayukhpsm/🎙️ Welcome to Revise and Resubmit.There is a particular tension in the modern world that we have all felt. It is the moment when you hear something hopeful, something that sounds like good news, and yet it arrives with a faint static in the background. You want to believe it. But you cannot quite tell if it is truth, or wishful thinking dressed up as information. 📡🧠Today’s episode lives in that static. We are talking about a paper with a title that feels like a piece of everyday advice and a quiet warning at the same time. With a Grain of Salt: Investor Reactions to Uncertain News and (Non)disclosure. Written by Libgober, J., Michaeli, B., and Wiedman, E., and published online in February 2026 in Volume 81, Issue 1 of the Journal of Accounting and Economics. 📄🔍And let’s pause on that journal for a second. The Journal of Accounting and Economics is not just respected. It is prestigious, and it sits on the FT50 list, which means it is part of the small, rare set of journals that shape what the field treats as serious knowledge. 🏛️🏆The paper asks what happens when outside news arrives with uncertain precision. Think social media chatter, analyst notes, headlines that sound confident but are not necessarily accurate. In theory, good news should lift a stock. In life, good news sometimes makes us suspicious, especially when the person who should speak stays quiet. 🤐📉That is the heart of this research. The authors show that when management does not disclose, investors often interpret even positive external news as unlikely to be precise. They take it with a grain of salt. That skepticism does something strange to prices. Better news can paradoxically lead to lower valuation, because investors start to believe that silence is covering up unfavorable private information. 🧂👀The market, in their model, becomes a place where reactions are not neat and linear. Prices can be nonmonotonic, swinging in counterintuitive ways, and the reaction is asymmetric. Bad news hits harder, good news gets doubted. And the presence of these outside information sources can even discourage firms from sharing their own private information, especially in high value industries, because disclosure is not just truth-telling. It is timing, strategy, and risk. ⏳📣If you love episodes where research explains the world you actually live in, make sure you subscribe to Revise and Resubmit on Spotify. And if you want the visuals and the deeper dives, subscribe to the YouTube channel Weekend Researcher. You can also find this show on Amazon Prime and Apple Podcasts. 🎧📺📲And a sincere thank you to Libgober, Michaeli, and Wiedman for this compelling work, and to Elsevier for publishing it in the Journal of Accounting and Economics, one of the truly elite FT50 journals. 🙏📚Now here is the question I cannot shake. If investors can learn to distrust good news simply because the people in charge stay silent, then in a world flooded with uncertain information, what does a company have to do to make its silence feel like restraint instead of guilt? ❓🕯️