We show the importance of emission disclosure for climate policies in a DSGE model for the euro area. A low-carbon energy and a fossil energy sector contribute to production and are financed by balance-sheet constrained intermediaries. The underestimation of emissions from fossil energy firms...

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...

Using microdata on stock-level lending positions from German mutual funds, we show that active funds use the equity lending market to obtain information about short sale demand. Funds reduce long positions in response to these demand signals, which allows fund managers to front-run public...

We examine the capital market reaction to the announcement of the European Union (EU) to introduce a public tax country-by-country reporting (CbCR) regime. By employing an event study methodology, we find a significant cumulative average abnormal return (CAAR) of -0.699%, which translates into a...

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...

Consider managers evaluating their employees' performances. Should managers justify their subjective evaluations? Suppose a manager's evaluation is private information. Justifying her evaluation is costly but limits the principal's scope for distorting her evaluation of the employee. I show that...

In models of certification possible restrictions on the nature of the fee structures are commonly analyzed. We show that they are irrelevant for the certifier's ability to maximize profits and trade efficiency. Our results establish that certification schemes involve two substitutable...

Restrictions on certifiers' fee structures are irrelevant for maximizing their profits and trade efficiency, and for the implementability of (monotone) distributions of rents. The irrelevance results exploit that certification schemes involve two substitutable dimensions-the fee structure and...

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...

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...