Firms constantly face new and more stringent tax disclosure requirements and, increasingly, paying a fair share of tax is seen as part of corporate social responsibility. In this paper, we investigate whether mandating qualitative tax disclosure leads to intended outcomes, using, as an exogenous...

When firms are forced to publicly disclose financial information, credit rating agencies are supposed to improve their risk assessments. Theory predicts such an information quality effect but also an adverse reputational concerns effect because credit analysts may become increasingly concerned...

Unfavorable news are often delivered under the disguise of vagueness. Our theory-driven laboratory experiment investigates this strategic use of vagueness in voluntary disclosure and asks whether there is scope for policy to improve information transmission. We find that vagueness is profitably...

We examine whether a disclosure mandate for greenhouse gas emissions creates stakeholder pressure for firms to subsequently reduce their emissions. For UK-incorporated listed firms such a mandate was adopted in 2013. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that firms affected by the...

How important is information disclosure through patents for subsequent innovation? To answer this question, we examine the expansion of the USPTO Patent Library system after 1975. Before the Internet, patent libraries gave inventors access to patent documents. We find that after patent library...

Firms are facing progressively more stringent tax disclosure requirements. In this paper, we examine whether increased qualitative tax transparency leads to intended outcomes using, as an exogenous shock, the 2016 UK reform that mandated the disclosure of a tax strategy for firms above a certain...

This paper introduces a stress test of the corporate credit portfolios of 24 large German banks by a two-stage approach: First, a macro-econometric model is used to forecast the impact of a substantial increase of the user cost of business capital for firms worldwide on three particularly...

How does asset encumbrance affect the fragility of intermediaries subject to rollover risk? We offer a model in which a bank issues covered bonds backed by a pool of assets that is bankruptcy remote and replenished following losses. Encumbering assets allows a bank to raise cheap secured debt...