Regulation Fair Disclosure and Earnings Information: Market, Analyst, and Corporate Responses

With the adoption of Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD), market behavior around earnings releases displays no significant change in return volatility (after controlling for decimalization of stock trading) but significant increases in trading volume due to difference in opinion. Analyst forecast dispersion increases, and increases in other measures of disagreement and difference of opinion suggest greater difficulty in forming forecasts beyond the current quarter. Corporations increase the quantity of voluntary disclosures, but only for current quarter earnings. Thus, Reg FD seems to increase the quantity of information available to the public while imposing greater demands on investment professionals.     

The Limits of Organizational Change

The paper builds on the Marxist concept of exploitation to explore the meaning of the Post Keynesian notion of uncertainty. Uncertainty is mediated by institutions and is distributed unevenly among different social groups. As different historical social formations entail different institutional structures, the distribution and nature of uncertainty will also differ. The social configurations between class relations and uncertainty are analyzed for the capitalist, feudal and slave modes of production. It is demonstrated that modes of production do not only imply specific exploitative relations but also different relative distributions of uncertainty amongst classes. The joining of Marxian and Post Keynesian approaches allows for a richer understanding of exploitive relations and illuminates the full societal impact of uncertainty. It is shown that only in capitalism is the exploited class exposed to a substantial degree of economic uncertainty.     

Participation in the National Flood Insurance Program: An Empirical Analysis for Coastal Properties

A perennial question about the National Flood Insurance Program is: how can participation be increased? An empirical analysis of individual‐level data reveals that in a sample of coastal areas the participation rate is 49 percent of eligible properties. Participation responsiveness to price is inelastic, but it has been increased by the mandatory purchase requirements for mortgage borrowers. Easing conditions for participation in the program would probably not reduce flood control measures, such as seawalls, which may degrade beach conditions and coastal ecosystems.