Firm disclosures often reach only a portion of investors, which results in information asymmetry among investors, and therefore lower market liquidity. This issue is particularly salient for firms that are not highly visible, as they tend not to receive broad news dissemination via traditional...

In this paper, we explore how reported accounting numbers are shaped by the institutional structure of the country in which firms are domiciled. We seek deeper understanding into the nature of financial reporting incentives created by an economy's institutional structure. We focus on financial...

We investigate corporate transparency, defined as the availability of firm-specific information to those outside publicly traded firms. We conceptualize corporate transparency within a country as output from a multi-faceted system whose components collectively produce, gather, validate and...

Motivated by extant finance theory predicting that insider trading crowds out private information acquisition by outside investors, we use analyst following data for 100 countries for the years 1987-1998, to study whether analyst following increases following adoption of or the initial...

This paper examines whether insider trades reflect the insiders' superior knowledge of future cash flow realizations, as proxied by the firm's future return and earnings performance. We find strong evidence that insider trades are positively associated with the firm's future earnings...

This paper examines the impact of management forecasts on short-term stock return volatility. Two measures of volatility are employed: excess intra-day price volatility and the standard deviation of returns. I find that the average management forecast is followed by heightened volatility in the...

We investigate the extent to which the trading and trade-generating activities of three informed market participants -- financial analysts, institutional investors, and insiders -- influence the relative amount of firm-specific, industry-level and market-level information impounded into stock...