Independent directors are valuable because they do not suffer from the agency coststhat afflict executive directors. Independent directors also operate at an informationaldisadvantage compared with executive directors, which makes it hard for them to carryout their duties of advising and...

In this study, we examine whether investors' actions to acquire accounting information are predictive of future firm performance because these actions partially reveal investors' private expectations of this performance. Using a database of EDGAR downloads, we find some evidence that information...