Silence can be golden: On the value of allowing managers to keep silent when information is soft

Most information that public firms are required to disclose is relatively hard (e.g., historical information), whereas the disclosure of relevant information that is softer in nature (e.g., forward-looking information) is typically left to firms' discretion. The lack of a mandatory requirement to disclose soft information has been at the heart of a number of on-going accounting debates. This study shows that while mandating disclosure increases the frequency of disclosure, it results in a reduction in disclosure quality when information is soft. By exploring this tradeoff, the paper sheds light on the merits of restricting mandatory disclosure requirements to verifiable information and leaving disclosure of soft information unregulated. The value of leaving disclosure unregulated is shown to be maximized when managers are given bonus-based compensation, with minimum performance thresholds and maximum caps, similar to those documented in the literature.     

Upfront versus staged financing: the role of verifiability

We compare upfront and staged financing to see when and how one financing policy prevails over the other. In our model, there are two moral hazard problems that interact with each other. First, the entrepreneur may pursue his own private benefit out of the raised fund in the initial period. Second, the entrepreneur may shirk on project evaluation at the refinancing stage if the project is stage-financed. When the entrepreneur's effort for project evaluation is verifiable, the project may be stage-financed even if the cost of evaluating effort exceeds the value of information (over-evaluation). When such effort is unverifiable, the project may be financed upfront even if the value of information exceeds the cost of evaluating effort (under-evaluation).     

All-or-nothing payments

We develop a general principal–agent framework in which to study optimal incentive schemes where agents are hired to work on multiple heterogeneous and interdependent projects. The incentive schemes can be based on output measures, interpreted as the principal’s payoffs, as well as input measures, regarded as observation of some of the agents’ efforts. We identify that a unifying feature of the optimal incentive schemes, called all-or-nothing payments, arises in three natural scenarios of the general framework: unobservable inputs, verifiable inputs, and observable but unverifiable inputs. Our framework and results embed and generalize several previous studies on multitask principal–agent problems with a limited liability constraint.