Multiemployer pension plans (MEPPs) provide retirement benefits for 11 million participants, yet until recently, hundreds of these pension plans – covering 3 million participants – faced insolvency. We use the 2021 passage of the American Rescue Plan Act to examine how pension bailouts...

The Internet Appendix provides examples of the CEO pay ratio disclosure and media coverage surrounding the CEO pay ratio disclosure, the description of entropy balancing program, the procedure for decomposing the pay ratio into predicted and unexpected components, summary statistics for...

In 1995 Congress passed the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA), which grants public companies a safe harbor from liability for forward-looking statements (FLS). Because investors cannot reasonably assess the legitimacy of forward-looking information for initial public offerings...

We investigate the effect of shocks to firms’ cost of capital on firms’ disclosure decisions. Specifically, we examine the extent to which firms issue Form 8-Ks and/or press releases following unexpected changes to the Fed funds rate. We find consistent evidence that unexpected decreases in...

We examine whether Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) financial statement disclosure influence local governments' economic decision-making. To do so, we exploit a recent GASB standard that differentially changed the disclosure requirements for pension obligations for county...

We draw on Merton (1987) to develop predictions for the benefits of voluntary disclosures made by firms pursuing an initial public offering (IPO) prior to when they begin to provide regulated financial information via their IPO prospectus. We find that voluntarily issuing press releases and...

We examine the effect of IPO proceeds on post-IPO liquidity and market monitoring. To do so we exploit variation in the amount of proceeds raised that is unrelated to firm size and manager decisions using an instrumental variable approach. We find that marginal increases in IPO proceeds lead to...