Using the introduction of high-speed rail as exogenous shocks to costs of information acquisition, we show that reductions in information-acquisition costs lead to a significant increase in information production and improvement in output quality, evidenced by higher frequency of analysts...

Prior research generally argues that managers issue management earnings forecasts (MFs) to secure capital market benefits (i.e., reduce information asymmetry between managers and investors to lower a firm's cost of capital), to reduce the firm's litigation costs, or to allow managers to trade...