Shareholder short-termism, corporate control and voluntary disclosure

This paper examines how a manager uses voluntary disclosure to influence corporate control by a short-term shareholder. Since a short-term shareholder intervenes excessively, the manager's disclosure strategy is determined by the trade-off between excessive and insufficient intervention. In equilibrium, when shareholder short-termism is not too high, the manager discloses both good and bad news, and withholds intermediate news. Alternatively, when shareholder short-termism is high, the manager only discloses good news and withholds bad news. In both equilibria, withholding information is value-enhancing for the nondisclosing firms. We also show that the likelihood of disclosure weakly decreases as the shareholder is more short-term oriented. Moreover, nondisclosing firms are more likely to face shareholder intervention than disclosing firms