In November 2020, the SEC issued amendments to Regulation S-K requiring filers to provide expanded discussions related to the firm’s human capital (HC). This study provides the first large-sample descriptive evidence related to the resulting HC disclosures during the first year of the...

To help companies comply with the certification requirements under Section 302 of SOX, the SEC recommends issuers form a disclosure committee, ‘for considering the materiality of information and determining disclosure obligations on a timely basis’ (SEC 2002a). While the importance of...

This paper investigates whether risk-related disclosure, which includes aggregate risk disclosure and its tone, including upside and downside risk disclosures, is value relevant for investors in the UK market. Based on 1941 firm-year observations for nonfinancial firms listed on the FTSE...

We examine misreporting of gender pay gap information. Beginning in 2017, the UK government mandated that UK employers report gender employment ratios and pay gaps. The mandate does not include an audit requirement and has received little regulatory enforcement. Nonetheless, supporters of the...

The countervailing effect of MiFID II’s unbundling provision, which requires brokerages to separate research costs from trading execution costs, on the capital market has led to controversies about its efficacy and its potential rollback. In this paper, we examine the role of firms’...

I examine whether company-implemented disclosure committees help to improve non-GAAP reporting quality. I find that firms with disclosure committees provide higher quality non-GAAP performance metrics and that the exclusions used to calculate their non-GAAP numbers are less persistent for future...

One key challenge of regulatory oversight is information asymmetry between the regulator and the regulated. We investigate this issue through a unique setting in which the SEC uses firms’ voluntary disclosures to bridge the information gap during their periodic reviews of mandatory...

As corporate ESG disclosures continue to grow in prominence and regulators begin to require attestation over ESG information, understanding the factors that influence ESG materiality assessments can help auditors provide more effective assurance over ESG information. We use an experiment to...

We examine how financial analysts use the information contained in TCFD aligned climate change disclosures in their forecasts, using firm-level textual climate change disclosures. The results show that climate change disclosures are associated with reduced forecast error and dispersion. This...

FASB Interpretation No. 48 (FIN 48) requires firms to disclose a forecast of significant changes in unrecognized tax benefits (UTBs) that are reasonably possible to occur within 12 months of the reporting date. According to paragraph 21(d), the “look-forward” disclosure, a firm must disclose...