We study optimal disclosure via two competing communication channels; hard information whose value has been verified and soft disclosures such as forecasts, unaudited statements and press releases. We show that certain soft disclosures may contain as much information as hard disclosures, and we...

We study the optimal disclosure policy of a firm that wishes to maximize its expected stock price in the classic setting in which its stock is traded by risk-averse investors and noise traders. We find that the optimal disclosure policy is imprecise and leads to skewed posterior beliefs. This...

Executive compensation contracts use information from markets and accounting to elicit efficient incentives. We structurally estimate the contribution of each performance to quantify the relative importance of price versus accounting. For plausible risk-aversion coefficients consistent with the...