Managers exercise considerable discretion over how they announce an accounting restatement in a press release. Some firms issue a press release that discloses the restatement in the headline (high prominence). Others provide a press release with a headline on a different subject (for example,...

This paper documents that changes in litigation risk affect corporate voluntary disclosure practices. We make causal inferences by exploiting three legal events that generate exogenous variations in firms' litigation risk. Using a matching-based, fixed-effect difference-indifferences design, we...

Using a large set of restatement announcements and regulatory filings by U.S.-listed firms between 2003 and 2009, we find evidence that managers aim to reduce litigation risk by (1) bundling negative information, such as earnings restatements, with other public announcements, and (2) leaking...

This study examines whether the required disclosure of directors' and officers' (D&O) insurance premiums leads to nonmeritorious securities litigation. Our research setting uses a proprietary D&O insurance database that includes New York and non-New York firms, combined with the fact that New...

This article examines the empirical incidence of the private and public enforcement of disclosure laws in Australia. Disclosure laws aim to ensure the reduction of information asymmetries and the accuracy of share prices, but their success is predicated on enforcement. In order to assess the...

We first analyse legal provisions relating to corporate transparency in Germany. We show that despite the new securities trading law (WpHG) of 1995, the practical efficacy of disclosure regulation is very low. On the one hand, the formation of business groups involving less regulated legal forms...

In today's uncertain financial climate it is particularly important for entities to explain their financial performance relative to their expectations. Therefore, the paper analyzes the quality and quantity of management reporting in Germany's publicly traded MDAX and SDAX companies using a...

The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision to let corporations spend unlimited sums in federal elections was premised on a pair of promises: Corporations would disclose expenditures, and shareholders would police such spending. Those promises remain unfulfilled: of $266 million spent by...

In a recent article, Professor Robert J. Jackson Jr. investigates the impact of public disclosure on equity dispositions by senior managers at Goldman Sachs. Utilizing previously overlooked data, Jackson finds that disclosure of sales per Securities Exchange Act section 16(a) dampens selling....