We develop the first general equilibrium exchange economy with risk-averse investors where firm managers can voluntarily make costly, discretionary disclosures regarding the liquidating value of the firm. This extends the discretionary disclosure setting of Verrecchia (1983) by relaxing the...

We model managers' equilibrium strategies for voluntarily disclosing information about their firm's risk. We consider a multi-firm setting in which the variance of each firm's future cash flow is uncertain. A manager can disclose, at a cost, this variance before offering the firm for sale in a...

In this study I use a principal-agent framework to analyze optimal contracting under two accounting standards, referred to as historical cost (HC) and market value (MV), and under differing asset market assumptions. I distinguish HC from MV by how revenue is recognized and in the reporting...

This paper assumes that there are two methods of estimating the value of a firm's assets, called the historical cost (HC) and market value (MV) methods, respectively. It assumes that the true value of the assets and the two estimates are all random variables, jointly distributed as a...

We study a model of financial reporting where investors infer the precision of reported earnings. Reporting a larger earnings surprise reduces the inferred earnings precision, dampening the impact on firm value of reporting higher earnings, and providing a natural demand for smoother earnings....

Starting in 1997, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission required that some firms disclose information about risks. One format for risk disclosures let firms disclose correlations by allowing firms to report the sensitivity to market risk factors of cash flows related only to financial...