We study the voluntary disclosure decision of activist speculators. They receive multi-dimensional information and endogenously choose trading positions. We embed these two features into a variant of the model in Dye (1985). We show that the speculator's disclosure is not monotonic in the...

While most accounting information is idiosyncratic in nature, economy-wide factors such as accounting standards affect the quality of idiosyncratic accounting information of many firms simultaneously. We study idiosyncratic and systematic features of accounting information by embedding a...

It is widely believed that disclosure quality improves investors’ welfare by reducing cost of capital in a competitive market. This paper examines this conventional wisdom by studying a production economy in which disclosure influences a firm’s investment decisions. I demonstrate three...

<heading id="h1" level="1" implicit="yes" format="display">ABSTRACT</heading>This paper examines the market efficiency consequences of accounting disclosure in the context of stock markets as a Keynesian beauty contest, an influential metaphor originally proposed by Keynes [1936] and recently formalized by Allen, Morris, and Shin [2006]. In such markets, public...

This paper formalizes a two-step representation of accounting measurement and uses it to formalize a general rationale for conservatism as a measurement principle. A transaction's economic substance manifests itself in characteristics of the transaction, and an accounting rule is a mapping from...

This paper examines the market efficiency consequences of accounting disclosure in the context of stock markets as a Keynesian beauty contest, an influential metaphor originally proposed by Keynes (1936) and recently formalized by Allen, Morris, and Shin (2006). In such markets, public...

Two complementary sources of information are studied in a multiperiod agency model. One is an accounting source which partially but credibly conveys the agent’s private information through accounting recognition. The other is an unverified communication by the agent (i.e., a self-report). In a...

In 1914, an accounting professor named Arthur Andersen founded a public accounting practice that became the world’s largest professional-services firm. For years preceding the Enron debacle and Andersen’s collapse, the firm had struggled to create incentives within the organization for...