Public firms provide a large amount of information through their disclosures. In addition, information intermediaries publicly analyze, discuss and disseminate these disclosures. Thus, greater public firm presence in an industry should reduce uncertainty in that industry. Following the...

This paper investigates the effect of mandatory disclosure requirements for private firms on their decision to go public. Using detailed project-level data for biopharmaceutical firms, we explore the effects of a legal reform---the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act (FDAAA)---which...

This paper investigates the effect of mandatory disclosure requirements for private firms on their decision to go public. Using detailed project-level data for biopharmaceutical firms, we explore the effects of a legal reform that exogenously required firms to publicly disclose information...

We use highly granular computational linguistics to assess the MD&A section of the 10-K as a whole. Our results show that the content of MD&A can be systematically used to explain the valuation of firms, particularly those undergoing business change, where the value relevance of financial...

We construct measures of firms' beliefs about climate regulation, plans for future abatement, and current actions on emissions mitigation, using Carbon Disclosure Project data. These measures vary significantly around the Paris climate change agreement announcement. A dynamic model of a...

This study provides international evidence that external financing dependence creates incentives for firms to undertake a higher level of voluntary accounting disclosure. For a sample of 856 observations from 34 countries and 18 different manufacturing industry sectors, we document that firms in...

This paper examines the implications of the option value of equity for firms' disclosures. Merton (1974) shows that the equity of levered firms is equivalent to a call option whose value increases in the expected variance of future cash flows. I use this equivalence to calculate firms' vega,...

We introduce and apply machine transfer learning methods to analyze accounting disclosures. We use the examples of the new BERT language model and sentiment analysis of quarterly earnings disclosures to demonstrate the key transfer learning concepts of: (i) pre-training on generic “Big...

What is the interaction between competition, R&D investments, and the financing choices of R&D-intensive firms? Motivated by existing theories, we hypothesize that as competition increases, R&D-intensive firms will: (1) increase R&D investment relative to assets-in-place that support existing...

More companies are disclosing free cash flow in their earnings announcements. Companies choose a range of definitions for disclosed free cash flow, none of which correspond to the theoretical definition. The most common definition (in 38% of free cash flow disclosures) is operating cash flow...