Mandatory Versus Voluntary Disclosure in Markets with Informed and Uninformed Customers

Numerous rules mandate the disclosure of sellers' information.This article analyzes two questions regarding disclosure: (i)Why wouldn't sellers voluntarily disclose their information?and (ii) Who gains and who loses with mandatory disclosure?Previous analyses assume that all customers are knowledgeableenough to understand a seller's disclosure, and a key resultis that there is no role for mandatory disclosure. Either voluntarydisclosure is forthcoming, or if it is not, no one prefers mandatorydisclosure. We generalize the standard model by consideringthe case in which not all customers understand a seller's disclosure.We show that if the fraction of customers who can understanda disclosure is too low, voluntary disclosure may not be forthcoming.If so, mandatory disclosure benefits informed customers, isneutral for uninformed customers, and harms the seller. Ourresults suggest that we should find mandatory disclosure inmarkets where product information is relatively difficult tounderstand.     

Strategic Communication with Lying Costs

I study a model of strategic communication between an uninformed Receiver and an informed but upwardly biased Sender. The Sender bears a cost of lying, or more broadly, of misrepresenting his private information. The main results show that inflated language naturally arises in this environment, where the Sender (almost) always claims to be of a higher type than he would with complete information. Regardless of the intensity of lying cost, there is incomplete separation, with some pooling on the highest messages. The degree of language inflation and how much information is revealed depend upon the intensity of lying cost. The analysis delivers a framework to span a class of cheap-talk and verifiable disclosure games, unifying the polar predictions they make under large conflicts of interest. I use the model to discuss how the degree of manipulability of information can affect the trade-off between delegation and communication.     

Information Disclosure as Environmental Regulation: A Theoretical Analysis

Governments around the world are beginning to embrace a new form of environmental regulation – mandatory disclosure of information. While information disclosure programs appear to have an impact on subsequent firm behavior – often resulting in lower levels of pollution – little is known about the costs and benefits of these programs and whether or not they enhance social welfare. This paper presents a simple bargaining model where mandatory information disclosure is used to overcome a lack of information on the part of the public. We characterize the conditions under which information disclosure will lead to a reduction in emissions, and ultimately, the conditions under which it will enhance social welfare. Several extensions of the model are briefly explored, including the effect of two sources of pollution – only one of which is subject to information disclosure. This paper was prepared while V. Santhakumar was a Visiting Scholar at the Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management Studies, Vanderbilt University.     

上市公司自愿性信息披露行为有效吗?-基于1998-2003年中国证券市场的检验

该文运用经济主体行为最优化与信息经济学方法,对新兴市场中上市公司自愿性信息披露行为动因及其披露机制进行分析,研究信息占优的上市公司经理层如何选择自愿性信息披露行为.在不完全信息条件下论证上市公司分别采取信息公开、分离策略或信息掩饰策略,进行完全性信息披露、部分性信息披露、信息非披露,从而实现公司价值的均衡过程.为验证自愿性信息披露行为的有效性程度,论文构建了中国上市公司自愿性信息披露指数(VDI),并对1998-2003年上市公司自愿性信息披露行为有效性进行实证研究.检验结果表明:(1)中国上市公司的VDI逐年提高;(2)规模大、效益好的上市公司,更倾向于实施自愿性信息披露;(3)公司治理指标对VDI的解释效果并不显著;(4)具有外资股的上市公司自愿性信息披露动机明显较强.     

Can biased polls distort electoral results? Evidence from the lab

We introduce a new methodological approach for studying the effect of biased polls on election outcomes and apply it to a set of new experiments with 375 participants. Voters may observe and learn about the bias by playing multiple voting rounds. While in control conditions, polls are unbiased, in treatment conditions, participants view only poll results where a particular candidate’s vote share is the largest. This candidate is consistently elected more often in the treatments than in the controls, because biased polls robustly distort voters’ expectations about vote shares. This effect holds after eighteen election rounds, out of which the first three are practice rounds, but somewhat more weakly in our main treatment where voters are explicitly informed about the bias.     

Probabilistic dominance and status quo bias

Decision makers have a strong tendency to retain the current state of affairs. This well-documented phenomenon is termed status quo bias. We present the probabilistic dominance approach to status quo bias: an alternative is considered acceptable to replace the status quo only if the chances of a (subjectively) severe loss, relative to the status quo, are not too high. Probabilistic dominance is applied and behaviorally characterized in a choice model that allows for a range of status quo biases, general enough to accommodate unanimity, but also standard expected utility maximization. We present a comparative notion of “revealing more bias towards the status quo” and study its implications to the probabilistic dominance model of choice. Lastly, the model is applied to the endowment effect phenomenon and to a problem of international portfolio choice when investors are home biased.     

组织合法性理论视角下强制性与自愿性环境披露对比研究

企业的强制性和自愿性社会和环境披露在获取组织合法性层面上有不同的效果.文章基于此领域中最前沿的组织合法性理论,对强制性和自愿性披露的合法性起源、动机、载体以及规制、规范和认知的获得进行了对比,通过研究提出了对我国企业披露实践的启示.     

Persistent media bias

The news media plays an essential role in society, but surveys indicate that the public views the media as biased. This paper presents a theory of media bias that originates with private information obtained by journalists through their investigations and persists despite profit-maximizing news organizations and rivalry from other news organizations. Bias has two effects on the demand for news. First, rational individuals are more skeptical of potentially biased news and thus rely less on it in their decision-making. This skepticism reduces demand and leads the news organization to set a lower price for its publication the greater is the bias it tolerates. Lower quality news thus commands a lower price. Second, bias makes certain stories more likely than others. Given their private information, journalists may bias their stories if their career prospects can be advanced by being published on the front page. News organizations can control bias by restricting the discretion allowed to journalists, but granting discretion and tolerating bias can increase profits if it allows journalists to be hired at a lower wage. Bias is not driven from the market by a rival news organization nor by a news organization with an opposing bias, and the profits of a high-bias news organization can be higher than the profits of a low bias one. Moreover, bias can be greater with competition than with a monopoly news organization. If individuals collectively choose regulation in place of their individual decision-making, bias increases the expected stringency of regulation.     

Aggregation Biases in Estimates of the Value per Statistical Life: Evidence from Longitudinal Matched Worker-Firm Data in Taiwan

This study uses a unique longitudinally-linked employer–employee dataset to estimate the magnitude of bias in estimating the value per statistical life (VSL) that arises from the conventional use of industry-average occupational risk. This unique dataset, covering workers in Taiwan over the period 1998–2002, allows us to distinguish among potential sources of bias including omitted variables and to control for the potential endogeneity of firm-specific job risk with respect to unobserved worker and firm characteristics. We find that VSL estimates based on risk data aggregated by three-digit manufacturing SIC codes are biased downward by an order of magnitude compared with estimates using firm-specific risk that control for endogeneity.     

When does financial integration matter for fiscal policy in a currency union? A welfare-based approach

We use a two-country new open economy macroeconomics model describing a currency union with imperfect financial integration. We assume that household preferences are biased towards the goods produced within the country. We use this setup to show how the degree of financial integration and the home bias affect the welfare efficiency of fiscal policy. This is particularly important for the implications of a fiscal policy launched by a member of the euro zone where the home bias is in a decreasing trend due to higher goods market integration and where there are explicit efforts to enhance financial integration. The results show in particular how the effects of an increasing financial integration on the impact of a fiscal policy can be mitigated or amplified by a decreasing home-product bias. Moreover, under certain conditions, the degree of financial integration has no effect on the welfare efficiency of fiscal policy despite its non-negligible effects on the components of welfare.     

Understanding Hurricane Evacuation Decisions Under Contingent Scenarios: A Stated Preference Approach

We conduct a stated preference analysis to understand the factors that individual households take into consideration to evacuate during hurricanes. In designing the contingent scenarios for evacuation, we randomly assign varying levels of hurricane characteristics (wind speed, lead time for landfall and the height of storm surge) combined with different types of emergency management options (voluntary versus mandatory evacuation order and a voucher with varying amounts to cover evacuation expenses). Findings indicate that individual households respond, in a non-linear fashion, to the intensity of hurricanes when making evacuation decisions. Respondents are also more likely to evacuate when the storm surge reaches a certain threshold. In terms of policy interventions, mandatory evacuation orders are more effective to increase the likelihood of evacuation. The potential intervention in the form of providing evacuation vouchers to assist households to cover their expenses (e.g. for food, water, transportation and lodging) also seems effective. We discuss policy implications of our findings.     

Morale,performance and disclosure

We study the optimal disclosure policy in a sender–receiver communication game where the receiver's morale, defined as his expected state of the world, affects his performance. The sender observes the state and chooses whether to disclose it to the receiver, who then decides whether to participate in a task. The receiver wins if his performance in the task meets a target. No disclosure is optimal if the receiver wins with average morale in each state. Otherwise, in the threshold disclosure equilibrium that Pareto-dominates full disclosure, the receiver quits as the sender discloses the worst states and wins as the sender withholds the rest. The receiver wins in more states in the Pareto-optimal equilibrium as the sender chooses a non-monotonic disclosure policy. Our theory reveals a trade-off between transparency and efficiency when morale affects performance. It has applications in a broad range of areas including military, family, education and business.     

A SEARCH‐EQUILIBRIUM APPROACH TO THE EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION ON LABOR MARKET OUTCOMES

We analyze the impact of the U.S. skill‐biased immigration influx that took place between 2000 and 2009 within a search and matching model that allows for skill heterogeneity, differential search cost, and capital‐skill complementarity. We find that although the skill‐biased immigration raised the overall net income to natives, it had distributional effects. Specifically, unskilled native workers gained in terms of both employment and wages. Skilled native workers, however, gained in terms of employment but lost in terms of wages. Nevertheless, in an extension where skilled natives and immigrants are imperfect substitutes, even the skilled wage rises.     

A Model of Reputation in Cheap Talk*

We study a dynamic game of advice where the sender's preferences are unknown to the receiver. The novel feature of the model is that there is more than one type of biased sender. We show that the more equal the proportions of different biases in the sender population, the greater the credibility of the information transmitted. Somewhat surprisingly, however, we also find that the receiver does not benefit from this equality. We discuss our results in the context of political lobbying and show that institutions that increase transparency lower lobbyists' incentives for truthtelling, but unambiguously promote the policymaker's welfare.     

Is Voluntary Pollution Abatement in the Absence of a Carrot or Stick Effective? Evidence from Facility Participation in the EPA’s 33/50 Program

We examine whether voluntary pollution abatement programs in which there is no program-specific participation incentive are effective in reducing emissions below what they would have been otherwise. We use data on facility participation in the 33/50 Program and emissions reported to the US EPA’s toxic releases inventory (TRI) between 1991 and 1995 for a sample of facilities whose parent firms committed to the program. By focusing on participation by individual facilities we avoid the influence of firm level incentives under the program. The mandatory disclosure of emissions data to the TRI avoids the potential bias evident in voluntarily disclosed data. We find that while facilities with larger total emissions were more likely to participate, there is no evidence of greater participation by facilities that account for a higher share of a parent firm’s 33/50 emissions. Although emissions of the 33/50 chemicals fell over the years, we find that participation in the program was not associated with the decline in the 33/50 releases generated by these facilities and the reductions seemed to have occurred for reasons unrelated to the program.     

Collusion and biased tournaments

Tournaments are vulnerable to collusion. This paper finds that biased tournaments can be more effective at preventing collusion than unbiased ones. When agents can collude to exert low effort, introducing some bias into tournaments generates opposite effects on favored and disfavored agents׳ respective incentives to exert high effort and provides strong incentives for the favored agent to deviate from collusion. Introducing an adequate degree of bias reduces the principal׳s incentive cost for preventing collusion; however, granting excessive bias instead increases the incentive cost. We show that the optimal level of bias can be endogenously determined.     

Sentiment and bias in performance evaluation by impartial arbitrators

This study investigates whether relative performance evaluations of labor output are biased in the presence of sentiment, even when the (supposedly independent) evaluators are external. Data from a field-experiment setting—involving a pro-sport League's best-player award—allows for empirical testing of this proposition. After controlling for within-match performance, the results show that the match officials provide significantly better evaluations to players celebrating a ‘milestone’ game—an occasion on which sentimental favorites exist. However, this sentiment bias holds only in certain cases, and appears to have weakened in more recent years.     

No more discount under enhanced fair value hierarchy

We use an integrated approach to analyse the reasons behind the discount on the balance-sheet fair value of illiquid financial instruments held by European banks and classified into the Level 3 Fair Value hierarchy under IFRS 7. We believe that the potential sources of misalignment are (1) the lack of disclosure, (2) earnings management, and (3) the lack of liquidity. We show that the discount implicit in market values is linked to the lack of mandatory additional disclosure required by IFRS 7 and that this result supports the strong enforcement activity made by national authorities.     

研发信息披露质量测度及制度改进

通过构建研发信息披露质量评价指标体系,运用熵值法对创业板上市公司2010年年度报告中披露的研发信息质量进行测度和分析,发现定量指标中的投入产出指标对研发信息披露质量影响最大,其次是内部研发环境指标。研究表明,建立研发信息披露制度规范,必须明确规定企业信息披露的最低限度,一方面要求上市公司在披露研发信息时应包括研发活动的一般性描述,另一方面规定企业研发信息强制披露范围。     

Financial cycles and fiscal multipliers

We show that fiscal multiplier estimations may be biased by movements in asset and credit markets, as they facilitate spurious correlations of changes in cyclically adjusted revenues and spending with output growth via an identification bias and an omitted variable bias, thus overstating episodes of expansionary consolidations and downplaying contractionary consolidations. When controlling for asset and credit market movements in otherwise standard approaches to identification, we find multipliers to increase on average by 0.3–1 units. Fiscal consolidations are thus more likely to be contractionary and more harmful to growth than expected by some strands of the existing literature.