scholarly journals Shareholder Litigation and the Information Content of Management Voluntary Disclosure

2019 ◽  
Vol 95 (5) ◽  
pp. 279-298
Author(s):  
Yuanyuan Ma
Keyword(s):  
Information Content ◽  
Private Information ◽  
Voluntary Disclosure ◽  
Legal Liability ◽  
Bad News ◽  
Good News ◽  
Voluntary Disclosures ◽  
Shareholder Litigation

ABSTRACT I study the information content of management voluntary disclosures disciplined by shareholder litigation. I model the litigation mechanism in which legal liabilities are based on the damages that shareholders suffer from buying a stock at an inflated price. I find that management does not fully reveal private information in equilibrium. Instead, their disclosures reveal only a range in which their private information lies. Thus, the precision of information is, to some extent, lost. Notably, increasing the severity of legal liability does not always reduce the loss of precision. In fact, when the legal liability reaches a certain level, more severe legal liability will result in less precise disclosures. I also find that good news and bad news have different precision. Specifically, good news is more precise than is bad news when legal liabilities are high, and bad news is more precise than is good news when legal liabilities are low.

Discretionary Aggregation

2016 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ebert ◽  
Dirk Simons ◽  
Jack D. Stecher
Keyword(s):  
Private Information ◽  
Voluntary Disclosure ◽  
Bad News ◽  
Good News ◽  
News Source ◽  
Hide Information ◽  
Many Sources ◽  
Jel Classifications

ABSTRACT We study a disclosure decision for a firm's manager with many sources of private information. The presence of multiple numerical signals provides the manager with an opportunity to hide information via aggregation, presenting net amounts in order to show information in its best light. We show that this ability to aggregate fundamentally changes the nature of voluntary disclosure, due to the market's inability to verify that a report is free of strategic aggregation. We find that, in equilibrium, the manager fully discloses if and only if the manager's private information makes the firm look sufficiently weak. By separating bad news from good news, a disaggregate report informs the market of as much offsetting news as possible, revealing how close the news is to a neutral benchmark. The result is, therefore, pooling at the top and separation at the bottom, the opposite of what transpires with a single news source. JEL Classifications: M41; D82; D83.

Do Managers Disclose or Withhold Bad News? Evidence from Short Interest

2018 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dichu Bao ◽  
Yongtae Kim ◽  
G. Mujtaba Mian ◽  
Lixin (Nancy) Su
Keyword(s):  
Private Information ◽  
Voluntary Disclosure ◽  
Stock Price ◽  
Data Availability ◽  
Bad News ◽  
General Tendency ◽  
Litigation Risk ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Conflicting Evidence ◽  
Short Interest

ABSTRACT Prior studies provide conflicting evidence as to whether managers have a general tendency to disclose or withhold bad news. A key challenge for this literature is that researchers cannot observe the negative private information that managers possess. We tackle this challenge by constructing a proxy for managers' private bad news (residual short interest) and then perform a series of tests to validate this proxy. Using management earnings guidance and 8-K filings as measures of voluntary disclosure, we find a negative relation between bad-news disclosure and residual short interest, suggesting that managers withhold bad news in general. This tendency is tempered when firms are exposed to higher litigation risk, and it is strengthened when managers have greater incentives to support the stock price. Based on a novel approach to identifying the presence of bad news, our study adds to the debate on whether managers tend to withhold or release bad news. Data Availability: Data used in this study are available from public sources identified in the study.

scholarly journals Feedback Effects, Asymmetric Trading, and the Limits to Arbitrage

2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (12) ◽  
pp. 3766-3797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Edmans ◽  
Itay Goldstein ◽  
Wei Jiang
Keyword(s):  
Private Information ◽  
Firm Value ◽  
Bad News ◽  
Good News ◽  
Asymmetric Effect ◽  
Trading Behavior ◽  
Feedback Effects ◽  
Limits To Arbitrage ◽  
Corporate Decisions ◽  
Fundamental Value

We analyze strategic speculators’ incentives to trade on information in a model where firm value is endogenous to trading, due to feedback from the financial market to corporate decisions. Trading reveals private information to managers and improves their real decisions, enhancing fundamental value. This feedback effect has an asymmetric effect on trading behavior: it increases (reduces) the profitability of buying (selling) on good (bad) news. This gives rise to an endogenous limit to arbitrage, whereby investors may refrain from trading on negative information. Thus, bad news is incorporated more slowly into prices than good news, potentially leading to overinvestment. (JEL D83, G12, G14)

Voluntary disclosures and market response to earnings announcements

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Dinesh Fernando ◽  
Justin Giboney ◽  
Richard A. Schneible
Keyword(s):  
Information Asymmetry ◽  
Stock Returns ◽  
Information Content ◽  
Voluntary Disclosure ◽  
Stock Price ◽  
Trading Volume ◽  
Voluntary Disclosures ◽  
Release Date ◽  
Price Movement ◽  
Content Type

Purpose The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of voluntary disclosure on information asymmetry between investors and the average information content of subsequent the earnings announcement. Design/methodology/approach The authors use empirical methodology relying on multiple regression analyses. The authors estimate models of trading volume and stock returns around the earnings’ release date as a function of voluntary disclosures, measured using information in the 8-K statements. Findings Voluntary disclosures prior to the earnings release date increase trading volume related to stock returns. In addition, voluntary disclosures also reduce stock price movement around that date. Research limitations/implications The results indicate that voluntary disclosures increase trading volume related to stock returns around the earnings release date. Such increases indicate increased differential precision among investors, demonstrating that voluntary disclosures increase differences in opinion among investors. The reduced stock price movement around the earnings release date also show that voluntary disclosures reduce the information content of earnings. One limitation is that the measure of voluntary disclosures does not consider the variation in the information content of individual disclosures. Practical implications Firms who make voluntary disclosures will need to carefully consider how to structure such releases to minimize asymmetry between investors. Investors should pay greater attention to finding out, and interpreting, voluntary disclosures by firms. Social implications Regulators have previously expressed concern about leveling the playing field between more and less informed investors. The results showing increased differences in information as a result of voluntary disclosures provide valuable insights as regulators debate the balance of mandated and voluntary disclosure. Originality/value This is the first study to investigate the effect of voluntary disclosures on information asymmetry among investors using trading volume and, consequently, the first to find increased differences among investors that result from those voluntary disclosures. The paper is also the first to use a direct measure of voluntary disclosure developed by Cooper et al. to demonstrate the negative relation between voluntary disclosure and the average informativeness of earnings announcements.

Conservatism, Optimal Disclosure Policy, and the Timeliness of Financial Reports

2001 ◽  
Vol 76 (4) ◽  
pp. 471-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank B. Gigler ◽  
Thomas Hemmer
Keyword(s):  
Financial Reporting ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
Bad News ◽  
Good News ◽  
Accounting System ◽  
Voluntary Disclosures ◽  
Accounting Earnings ◽  
Financial Reports ◽  
Disclosure Policy ◽  
Conservative Accounting

We develop a theory of the relation between biases in financial reporting and managers' incentives to issue timely voluntary disclosures. We find that firms with relatively more conservative accounting are less likely to make timely voluntary disclosures than firms with less conservative accounting. Therefore, price is more timely in reflecting the news of firms with less conservative accounting. Prior research has assumed that the timeliness by which news is impounded in price is uncorrelated with the nature of accounting earnings and has ascribed a concave earnings-return relation to the accounting system reporting bad news on a more timely basis than good news. In our theory, a concave relation is not necessarily attributable to a difference in the way the accounting system reports good vs. bad news. Rather, our prediction stems from how biases in mandatory financial reports determine which firms optimally choose to make voluntary preemptive disclosures and which do not. Hence, our theory provides an alternative explanation for the empirical findings and cautions against interpreting them as evidence that accounting is conservative. Finally, we identify means of empirically distinguishing between the alternative explanations.

scholarly journals The Sound of Silence: What Do We Know When Insiders Do Not Trade?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
George P. Gao ◽  
Qingzhong Ma ◽  
David T. Ng ◽  
Ying Wu
Keyword(s):  
Stock Returns ◽  
Information Content ◽  
Insider Trading ◽  
Bad News ◽  
Litigation Risk ◽  
Shareholder Litigation

This paper examines the information content of insider silence, periods of no insider trading. We hypothesize that, to avoid litigation risk, rational insiders do not sell own-company shares when they anticipate bad news; neither would they buy, given unfavorable prospects. Thus, they keep silent. By contrast, insiders sell shares when they do not anticipate significant bad news. Future stock returns are significantly lower following insider silence than following insider net selling, especially among firms with higher litigation risk. We examine two quasinatural experiments where new laws result in changes in shareholder litigation risks for insiders. In both cases, with higher shareholder litigation risks, stocks where insiders stay silent earn significantly lower returns than other stocks. This paper was accepted by Karl Diether, finance.

A Rationale for Imperfect Reporting Standards

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry L. Friedman ◽  
John S. Hughes ◽  
Beatrice Michaeli
Keyword(s):  
Financial Reporting ◽  
Private Information ◽  
Voluntary Disclosure ◽  
Accounting Standards ◽  
Direct Costs ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Mandatory Reporting ◽  
Comparative Statics ◽  
Voluntary Disclosures ◽  
Financial Reports

The aim of general purpose financial reporting is to provide information that is useful to investors, lenders, and other creditors. With this goal, regulators have tended to mandate increased disclosure. We show that increased mandatory disclosure can weaken a firm’s incentive to acquire and voluntarily disclose private information that is not amenable to inclusion in mandated reports. Specifically, we provide conditions under which a regulator, seeking to maximize the total amount of information provided to investors via both mandatory and voluntary disclosures, would mandate less informative and more conservative financial reports even in the absence of any direct costs of increasing informativeness. This result is robust to allowing the firm to make reports more informative and to imposing a nondisclosure cost or penalty on the firm. The results and comparative statics analysis contribute to our understanding of interactions between mandatory reporting and voluntary disclosure and demonstrate a novel benefit to setting accounting standards that mandate imperfectly informative reports. This paper was accepted by Suraj Srinivasan, accounting.

Discussion: “Limits to Voluntary Disclosure in Efficient Markets”

1996 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 388-391 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Antle
Keyword(s):  
Capital Market ◽  
Private Information ◽  
Voluntary Disclosure ◽  
One Dimension ◽  
Efficient Markets ◽  
Voluntary Disclosures ◽  
Accounting Research ◽  
Coding Schemes

This paper addresses a very important and rich topic for accounting research: what are the incentives for making voluntary disclosures to an efficient capital market when private information has more than one dimension? There are many aspects to this topic, and I will use this discussion as a vehicle for discussing four of them. In particular, this discussion addresses aggregation, coding schemes, auditing, and sender-receiver models. Particular aspects of the paper are used to illustrate various points about these general ideas.

What Do Employees Know? Evidence from a Social Media Platform

2019 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelly Huang ◽  
Meng Li ◽  
Stanimir Markov
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Information Content ◽  
Operating Performance ◽  
Bad News ◽  
Good News ◽  
Wisdom Of Crowds ◽  
Job Responsibilities ◽  
Social Media Platform ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
News Events

ABSTRACT We use employee predictions of their companies' six-month business outlook from Glassdoor.com to assess the information content of employee social media disclosures. We find that average employee outlook is incrementally informative in predicting future operating performance. Its information content is greater when the disclosures are aggregated from a larger, more diverse, more knowledgeable employee base, consistent with the wisdom of crowds phenomenon. Average outlook predicts bad news events more strongly than good news events, suggesting that employee social media disclosures are relatively more important as a source of bad news. Consistent with the organizational theory, we find systematic differences in the quantity and nature of the information in employee disclosures when the disclosures are grouped based on employee attributes and job responsibilities. Finally, average outlook predicts future returns of firms that attract less attention by analysts and investors, suggesting that investors in these firms use outlook inefficiently.

Voluntary Disclosure

1989 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 480-511 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Dontoh
Keyword(s):  
Nash Equilibrium ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Private Information ◽  
Voluntary Disclosure ◽  
Market Price ◽  
Market Equilibrium ◽  
Voluntary Disclosures ◽  
Unique Nash Equilibrium ◽  
Future Outcomes ◽  
Competitive Product

The paper investigates incentives for firms to voluntarily disclose private information about future outcomes. A voluntary disclosure model that encompasses a competitive product market equilibrium and where proprietary (disclosure costs) costs are endogenously determined is presented. Possible explanations for empirical phenomena such as why value-maximizing firms voluntarily disclose unfavorable information (disclosures that cause investors to lower their expectations of firm earnings) when such disclosures tend to result in significant market price declines is provided. Existence of a unique Nash equilibrium where firms exercise discretion over such disclosures is demonstrated, and implications for extant empirical research on voluntary disclosures are discussed.

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