Does the payout amount in our price data match the amount each company declared in its own filings?
Study 79 · No reading (stopped by its own checks) · recorded 1 November 2026 · answer: Not settled · full paper with figures
The question
Study 77 found that, on a share's first day without its payout, the gain from prior close to opening, payout added back and net of comparable shares, is 0.1421 percentage points larger for the third of largest payouts relative to price than the smallest (95% range 0.0723 to 0.2119). We ask whether misrecorded payouts could carry part of that gap.
Rules fixed before the result
Fixed before any amount was read: a random sample of 450 payout dates from the highest third and 225 from the lowest, from companies with a filing listed in the securities regulator's public filing archive. The answer was to read the gap between the thirds' recording errors against a tenth and half of study 77's 0.1421 points. More than three disagreements in a hand check of 30 sampled dates stop the study.
Data and method
Each paying company was linked to its filings in the securities regulator's public filing archive, and its current and periodic reports around each sampled date were fetched read-only. A program, written before any recorded amount was looked at, read each report's declared amount per share and its record date. Before the program saw the sample, 30 sampled dates were read by hand and compared with the program's readings.
The answer
Not settled. The check stopped at its quality step, before any recorded amount was compared with a declared one. The rules set in advance stop the study when the program that reads the filings and a hand reading of the same filings disagree on more than three of 30 sampled dates, and they did. So no answer is given on whether the recorded amounts would move study 77's gap by a tenth (0.0142 points) or half (0.0710 points) of it.
What it changes
Nothing changes in study 77's published reading: under the rules set in advance, a stopped check leaves that reading and its timing note as they were. Whether to try again with a corrected filing reader is left to the next choice of study.
What remains uncertain
The recorded payout amounts remain unchecked against the companies' own declarations, so a recording error shared by the price data could still carry part of study 77's gap. The years 2018 to 2022 were used before, by study 77 on these same dates, so this was a check inside our development data, not a test on fresh data.