Disclosure incentives when competing firms have common ownership

This paper examines whether common ownership – i.e., instances where investors simultaneously own significant stakes in competing firms – affects voluntary disclosure. We argue that common ownership (i) reduces proprietary cost concerns of disclosure, and (ii) incentivizes firms to “internalize” the externality benefits of their disclosure for co-owned peer firms. Accordingly, we find a positive relation between common ownership and disclosure. Evidence from cross-sectional tests and a quasi-natural experiment based on financial institution mergers help mitigate concerns that our results are explained by an omitted variable bias or reverse causality. Finally, we find that common ownership is associated with increased market liquidity.     

Optimal Disclosure Policy in Oligopoly Markets

This paper examines the private and social optimality of full disclosure of private information in a two-period oligopoly model. An incumbent firm is privately informed about the market demand and its production cost after operating as a monopolist in the first period, and then competes against an entrant in the second period. Two main results are derived. First, it is shown that the incumbent is best off by pre-committing to disclose both the demand and cost information. By disclosing full information, the incumbent nullifies its self-defeating intertemporal incentives, which arise whenever it has private information about the market demand, its cost efficiency, or both. In addition, the equilibrium output variance is the largest under full disclosure, which benefits the incumbent ex ante. Second, the paper shows that the incumbent's full disclosure of the demand and cost information may or may not be desirable from a social efficiency standpoint. In particular, the correlation between the firms' production costs is crucial to the rank of disclosure policies in terms of their impact on social efficiency.     

Determinants and consequences of voluntary disclosure in an emerging market: Evidence from China

In this paper we examine empirically the determinants of voluntary disclosure in the annual reports of Chinese listed firms that issue both domestic and foreign shares and determine if the cost of debt capital is related to the extent of voluntary disclosure. We find the level of voluntary disclosure is positively related to the proportion of state ownership, foreign ownership, firm performance measured by return on equity, and reputation of the engaged auditor. There is no evidence, however, that companies benefit from extensive voluntary disclosure by having a lower cost of debt capital.     

Waiting and following: Within-industry herding behavior in annual report disclosure

Using the unique scheduled disclosure system for annual reports in China’s stock market, we examine within-industry herding behavior in annual report timing. The results reveal the waiting and following behavior strategies used in the annual reporting process within industry. Firms that originally schedule an early (late) disclosure date within their industry are more likely to reschedule to a later (earlier) date. Informational pressure is the dominant mechanism underlying herding in annual reporting, and capital market reputation incentives mainly induce the herding of bad news. Further analysis shows that delaying disclosure via the waiting strategy reduces the future occurrence of restatements, whereas bringing forward disclosure does not change the propensity of future restatements. Overall, we enrich the limited empirical studies on sequential mandatory disclosure decisions within industry.     

Peer effects in corporate disclosure decisions

This study examines peer effects in corporate disclosure decisions. Peer effects suggest that the average behavior of a group influences the behavior of individual group members. Consistent with peer effects, I find that disclosures made by industry peers induce firm disclosure. Peer effects in disclosure are more pronounced when a firm's strategic uncertainty is higher, indicating that peer firm disclosure reduces the external uncertainty arising from the firm's interaction with its industry peers and thus increases the precision of managerial private information. I also find that peer effects are stronger when a firm's dependence on external financing is greater, suggesting that peer firm disclosure increases the costs on firm visibility and reputation in capital markets. Overall, these findings suggest that peer firm disclosure shapes a firm's information environment.     

Disclosure,investment and regulation

This paper provides a framework to analyze voluntary and mandatory disclosure. Since improved disclosure reduces the entrepreneur's ability to extract private benefits, it secures funding for new investments, but also provides existing claimholders with a windfall gain. As a result, the entrepreneur may choose to forgo investment in favor of extracting more private benefits. A mandatory disclosure standard reduces inefficient extraction and increases investment efficiency. Although the optimal standard is higher than the entrepreneur's optimal choice, it can be less than complete in order not to deter investment. The model also shows that better legal shareholder protection goes together with higher disclosure standards and that harmonization of disclosure standards may be detrimental.     

Does hedge disclosure influence cost of capital for European banks?

Upon extracting and quantifying relevant hedge information from the narrative section of European banks annual reports, this paper examines the impact of such information on cost of capital [as measured by weighted average cost of capital (WACC), cost of equity (COE) and cost of debt (COD)]. Using a sample of 1885 bank-year observations from 19 countries, we find that textual hedge disclosure leads to a significant reduction in WACC, COE, and COD; thus explains a substantial portion of variation in cost of capital. Further, we find that these results are stronger in countries with high corruption and financial openness. Our results are robust to several controls and model specification. Collectively, our findings enrich prior evidence which examines the economic consequences of hedge disclosure.     

FIRM RESOURCES,QUALITY SIGNALS AND THE DETERMINANTS OF CORPORATE ENVIRONMENTAL REPUTATION: SOME UK EVIDENCE

Using the example of the creation of corporate environmental reputation, the article offers a theoretical extension of the resource-based view of the firm to include quality signalling via the channel of accounting disclosure. The proposed framework is then tested via an empirical survey into the relationship between environmental disclosure and environmental reputation. The results suggest that implementation, monitoring and disclosure of environmental policies and their disclosure in annual reports contribute significantly to the creation of environmental reputation. Diverse institutional share ownership and low systematic risk are also associated with positive environmental reputation. Prior financial performance has no impact and there is no evidence that environmental reputation is created by a financial halo effect or by the availability of slack financial resources.     

Segment Disclosure and Cost of Capital

We investigate whether segment disclosure influences cost of capital. Improved segment reporting is expected to decrease cost of capital by reducing estimation risk. However, in a competitive environment segment disclosure may also generate uncertainties about future prospects and lead to a larger cost of capital. Asset‐pricing tests confirm that segment disclosure is a priced risk factor. Also, segment disclosure reduces ex‐ante estimates of cost of equity capital and other measures connected to risk. These results suggest a negative relation between segment disclosure and cost of capital. Our results also show that competition reduces, but does not eliminate, the previous relationship.     

Do actions speak louder than words? An empirical investigation of corporate environmental reputation

In this study, we investigate the extent to which firms’ environmental performance is reflected in perceptions of their environmental reputation and whether environmental disclosure serves to mediate the negative aspects of poorer environmental performance associated with those assessments. We also examine whether differences in environmental performance and environmental disclosure appear to be associated with membership selection to the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI), a factor we also believe may be associated with perceptions of environmental reputation. Based on a cross-sectional sample of 92 US firms from environmentally sensitive industries, we find that environmental performance measured using Trucost environmental performance scores is negatively related to both reputation scores and membership in the DJSI. We argue this is due to the more extensive disclosure levels of firms that are worse performers and the finding of a significant positive relation between environmental disclosure and both the environmental reputation measures and DJSI membership. Finally, we show that the DJSI designation positively influences perceptions of corporate reputation. Overall, our results suggest that voluntary environmental disclosure appears to mediate the effect of poor environmental performance on environmental reputation. Perhaps more troubling, our results also suggest that membership in the DJSI appears to be driven more by what firms say than what they do. Thus, like voluntary disclosure, the DJSI may actually be hindering improved future corporate environmental performance.     

Examining the effect of deception detection decision aids on investors' perceptions of disclosure credibility and willingness to invest

Recent evidence suggests that the trend of issuing video disclosures is growing and investors are exposed to the risk of including deceptive information in their decisions. This study suggests that investors can use deception detection decision aids to identify deceptive behavior in video disclosures, and that the use of such decision aids affects their perceptions of disclosure credibility and willingness to invest. The theoretical framework of this study suggests that providing investors with a deception detection decision aid affects their willingness to invest through their perceptions of disclosure credibility, and that this effect is conditional on management's reputation. Using data from 387 nonprofessional investors, the findings provide support for the predicted effect of deception detection decision aid on investors' judgment and decision making. The effect of providing investors with a deception detection decision aid is fully mediated by investors' perceptions of disclosure credibility, and that effect is significantly stronger when management's reputation is good than when management's reputation is bad.     

EVIDENCE THAT GREATER DISCLOSURE LOWERS THE COST OF EQUITY CAPITAL

The effect of corporate disclosure on the cost of equity capital is a matter of considerable interest and importance to both corporations and the investment community. However, the relationship between disclosure level and cost of capital is not well established and has proved difficult for researchers to quantify. As described in this article, the author's 1997 study (published in The Accounting Review) was the first to measure and detect a direct relationship between disclosure and cost of capital. After examining the annual reports of 122 manufacturing companies, the author concluded that companies providing more extensive disclosure had a lower (forward‐looking) cost of equity capital (measured using Value Line forecasts with an EBO valuation formula that derives from the dividend discount model). For companies with extensive analyst coverage, differences in disclosure do not appear to affect cost of capital. But for companies with small analyst followings, differences in disclosure do appear to matter. Among this group of companies, the firms judged to have the highest level of disclosure had a cost of equity capital that was nine‐percentage points lower than otherwise similar firms with a minimal level of disclosure. Closer analysis of some of the specific disclosure practices also suggests that, for small firms with limited analyst coverage, there are benefits to providing more forward‐looking information, such as forecasts of sales, profits, and capital expenditures, and enhanced disclosure of key non‐financial statistics, such as order backlogs, market share, and growth in units sold. In closing, the article also discusses an interesting new study (by Lang and Lundholm) that suggests there is an important distinction between effective corporate disclosure and “hyping the stock.” The findings of this study show that while higher levels of disclosures are associated with higher stock prices, sudden increases in the frequency of disclosure are viewed with skepticism.     

Mandatory corporate social responsibility disclosure and dividend payouts: evidence from a quasi‐natural experiment

Employing the enactment of a regulation that mandates a subset of firms to disclose their corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities as a quasi‐natural experiment, we find that mandatory CSR disclosure reduces firms’ dividend payouts significantly. Further analyses indicate that the negative relation is more pronounced for firms with weaker corporate governance mechanisms, where shareholders lack of effective tools to protect themselves against pressures from stakeholders, and a shift of relative power towards stakeholders is more likely to occur. Our paper provides a specific channel through which mandatory CSR disclosure benefits stakeholders at the expense of shareholders.     

Equity home bias and corporate disclosure

I show that more comprehensive corporate disclosure reduces investors’ uncertainty about domestic companies’ payoffs at no cost, thereby decreasing investors’ equity home bias toward a country. Since investors should base their investment decisions on valid and easily interpretable company information only, more comprehensive disclosure will reduce the home bias only if domestic securities law is sufficiently stratified and domestic companies use international accounting standards. Using panel data for 38 countries from 2003 to 2008 I find that more comprehensive disclosure reduces investors’ home bias, though significantly only for countries that sufficiently enforce their securities law and implement international accounting standards.     

Do Family Firms Provide More or Less Voluntary Disclosure?

We examine the voluntary disclosure practices of family firms. We find that, compared to nonfamily firms, family firms provide fewer earnings forecasts and conference calls, but more earnings warnings. Whereas the former is consistent with family owners having a longer investment horizon, better monitoring of management, and lower information asymmetry between owners and managers, the higher likelihood of earnings warnings is consistent with family owners having greater litigation and reputation cost concerns. We also document that family ownership dominates nonfamily insider ownership and concentrated institutional ownership in explaining the likelihood of voluntary disclosure. Using alternative proxies for the founding family's presence in the firm leads to similar results.     

Different open book accounting practices for different purchasing strategies

Extant studies of open book accounting focus primarily on data disclosure in long-term, committed purchasing arrangements. We extend research beyond that context by exploring the association between open book practices (in terms of nature and uses of disclosed data as well as conditions of data disclosure) and two different purchasing strategies. Three case studies are performed. Results indicate that within market procurement characterized by a transactional purchasing strategy, cost data primarily serve to reduce purchase price. Therefore, data disclosure is limited in scope and scale, occurs primarily during supplier evaluation and selection, and is characterized by an adversarial atmosphere. Incentives for suppliers to open their books focus on short-term tangible gains. Within a hybrid exchange arrangement characterized by a relational purchasing strategy, data disclosure supports cost reduction, e.g., through joint product development, and is more comprehensive. The atmosphere is less adversarial and suppliers reap long-term benefits.     

Competition among exchanges through simplified disclosure requirements: evidence from the American and Global Depositary Receipts

In this study, we address the ongoing debate as to whether the competition among the world's major exchanges through simplified disclosure requirements is justified. Companies from across the globe have a choice of cross-listing shares as either American or Global Depositary Receipts (ADRs and GDRs, respectively). The former are primarily listed on the US exchanges – NYSE, NASDAQ and AMEX – whereas the latter are issued into non-US markets such as the London Stock Exchange (LSE). The GDRs listed on the LSE are subject to simplified disclosure requirements compared to their exchange-listed ADR peers that have to meet more stringent compliance standards. Proponents of the ‘light touch’ approach argue that firms cross-listing as GDRs are not subject to the higher reporting costs faced by ADRs yet still face similar valuation benefits. Those who challenge this approach argue that simplified disclosure requirements set by the LSE will ultimately be recognised by the market as ineffective, diverting traders from investing in GDRs. This study provides evidence that supports the LSE's ‘light touch’ approach and shows that the benefits of information risk reduction for ADRs and GDRs are comparable. The explanation for this finding is that the two avenues through which information asymmetry is expected to be resolved after cross-listing – disclosure and analysts – are substitutive and make equally important contribution to information risk reduction, eventually leading to similar cost of capital decline for ADRs and GDRs.     

上市公司分部信息披露动因与约束

分部信息的披露主体主要是上市公司.公司出于竞争投资者有限的资金等目的有自愿披露分部信息的动因.由于分部信息披露存在成本,在没有管制的情况下,企业出于自身利益最大化考虑,将通过对收益和成本的权衡来决定分部信息披露.由于分部信息披露的外部性、分部信息分布的不对称性等,不能完全依赖于自愿披露,必须对分部信息披露进行适度的管制,强制公司披露分部信息.     

Disclosure and the cost of capital: A discussion

In this discussion I comment on the contribution of two papers toward our understanding of how disclosure affects the cost of capital. Specifically, in the context of these papers, I comment on whether disclosure ameliorates or exacerbates the cost of capital that arises from the existence of information asymmetries in capital markets. This is a notion that should be of fundamental interest in that it provides an economic basis for evaluating the costs and benefits of accounting information.     

Corporate social responsibility disclosure and the cost of equity capital: The roles of stakeholder orientation and financial transparency

We examine the benefits associated with corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure in an international setting covering 31 countries. Using variables such as the legal status of labor protection, CSR disclosure requirements, and public awareness of and attitudes toward CSR issues, we divide countries into more and less stakeholder-oriented groups. We find a negative association between CSR disclosure and the cost of equity capital; this relationship is more pronounced in stakeholder-oriented countries. We also find evidence that financial and CSR disclosures act as substitutes for each other in reducing the cost of equity capital. This study furthers our understanding of CSR disclosure and its consequences.