Most studies of voluntary disclosure examine the securities market, where voluntary disclosure is incremental to the requirements of highly developed reporting standards. In this paper, I examine the market for new franchises, where there is no requirement that potential franchise investors be...

What drives investors' attention? We study how far in advance earnings calendars are pre-announced and find that investors are more attentive to earnings news when such details are disclosed well ahead of time. This variation in investors' attention affects stock prices, thereby creating...

We develop a unified treatment of a broad class of truthful disclosure games. Such games have, at most, one equilibrium that is reasonable given a commonly used signaling refinement. We provide a simple algorithm to construct the unique equilibrium strategy and beliefs, and identify necessary...

We present the first large-sample empirical evidence on U.S. auditors' responses to changes in entity-level audit risk during 2006-2007, the period leading-up to the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Treating fiscal year 2005 engagements as a pre-crisis benchmark, we find that audit attention...

We empirically study how collusion in product markets affects firms' financial disclosure strategies. We find that after a rise in cartel enforcement, U.S. firms start sharing more detailed information in their financial disclosure about their customers, contracts, and products. This new...

This study examines how industry peers share information when they are engaged in tacit collusion. We develop a model of firms' information sharing and production decisions and use it to establish that firms engaged in tacit collusion are more likely to share information when current market...

Auditors' propensity to issue Going Concern Audit Reports (GCARs) is one of the proxies often used for audit quality. Although this propensity is a distinguishing characteristic of auditors, it does not indicate quality according to both theory and practice. In theory, higher-quality auditors...

A critical issue in international financial management is that of "balancing the government's books" (The Economist 1994, p. 73). Since governmental commitments to maintaining or improving citizens' well-being are subject to re­source constraints, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board...

This study addresses whether an auditor change (a resignation or a dismissal) mitigates information asymmetry as measured by market liquidity or trading activity. For auditor dismissals our results show no effect on our sample firms' market liquidity or trading activity. By contrast, for auditor...

High disclosure standards are perceived to be the cornerstone of the U.S. securities markets. However. the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) prohibits the quantification of unproved reserves by U.S. oil and gas firms (based on the argument that it would mislead unsophisticated individual...