Using a unique empirical setting, family firms in the S&P 500, Ali et al. [Ali, A., Chen, T.-Y., Radhakrishnan, S., 2007. Corporate disclosures by family firms. Journal of Accounting and Economics, doi:10.1016/j.jacceco.2007.01.006] contribute to a growing body of research on the relation between corporate governance and corporate disclosure quality. Using an indicator variable for sub-sample membership as an instrument for differing agency costs, the authors interpret their findings as consistent with family firms facing lower overall agency costs and providing higher quality corporate disclosures. However, their empirical findings are open to alternative interpretations and in totality present relatively weak, indirect evidence of a relation between corporate governance and the quality of corporate disclosure.

Prior to Regulation Fair Disclosure (“Reg FD”), some management privately guided analyst earnings estimates, often through detailed reviews of analysts' earnings models. In this paper I use proprietary survey data from the National Investor Relations Institute to identify firms that reviewed analysts' earnings models prior to Reg FD and those that did not. Under the maintained assumption that firms conducting reviews guided analysts' earnings forecasts, I document firm characteristics associated with the decision to provide private earnings guidance. Then I document the characteristics of “guided” versus “unguided” analyst earnings forecasts. Findings demonstrate an association between several firm characteristics and guidance practices: managers are more likely to review analyst earnings models when the firm's stock is highly followed by analysts and largely held by institutions, when the firm's market‐to‐book ratio is high, and its earnings are important to valuation but hard to predict because its business is complex. A comparison of guided and unguided quarterly forecasts indicates that guided analyst estimates are more accurate, but also more frequently pessimistic. An examination of analysts' annual earnings forecasts over the fiscal year does not distinguish between guidance and no‐guidance firms; both experience a “walk‐down” in annual estimates. To distinguish between guidance and no‐guidance firms, one must examine quarterly earnings news: unguided analysts walk down their annual estimates when the majority of the quarterly earnings news is negative; guided analysts walk down their annual estimates even though the majority of the quarterly earnings news is positive.

We investigate the relation between the transparency of financial statements and the distribution of stock returns. Using earnings management as a measure of opacity, we find that opacity is associated with higher R2s, indicating less revelation of firm-specific information. Moreover, opaque firms are more prone to stock price crashes, consistent with the prediction of the Jin and Myers [2006. R2 around the world: new theory and new tests. Journal of Financial Economics 79, 257–292] model. However, these relations seem to have dissipated since the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, suggesting that earnings management has decreased or that firms can hide less information in the new regulatory environment.

This paper investigates whether firms benefit from expanded voluntary disclosure by examining changes in capital market factors associated with increases in analyst disclosure ratings for 97 firms. The disclosure rating increases are accompanied by increases in sample firms' stock returns, institutional ownership, analyst following, and stock liquidity. These findings persist after controlling for contemporaneous earnings performance and other potentially influential variables, such as risk, growth, and firm size. While it is difficult to draw unambiguous causal conclusions, these results are consistent with disclosure model predictions that expanded disclosure leads investors to revise upward valuations of the sample firms' stocks, increases stock liquidity, and creates additional institutional and analyst interest in the stocks.

ABSTRACT We examine how corporate social media affects the capital market consequences of firms’ disclosure in the context of consumer product recalls. Product recalls constitute a “product crisis” exposing the firm to reputational damage, loss of future sales, and legal liability. During such a crisis it is crucial for the firm to quickly and directly communicate its intended message to a wide network of stakeholders, which, in turn, renders corporate social media a potentially useful channel of disclosure. While we document that corporate social media, on average, attenuates the negative price reaction to recall announcements, the attenuation benefits of corporate social media vary with the level of control the firm has over its social media content. In particular, with the arrival of Facebook and Twitter, firms relinquished complete control over their social media content, and the attenuation benefits of corporate social media, while still significant, lessened. Detailed Twitter analysis confirms that the moderating effect of social media varies with the level of firm involvement and with the amount of control exerted by other users: the negative price reaction to a recall is attenuated by the frequency of tweets by the firm, while exacerbated by the frequency of tweets by other users.

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the residual income valuation model proposed in Ohlson (Ohlson, J.A., 1995. Earnings, book values and dividends in security valuation. Contemporary Accounting Research 11, 661–687). We point out that existing empirical research relying on Ohlson's model is similar to past research relying explicitly on the dividend-discounting model. We establish that the key original empirical implications of Ohlson's model stem from the information dynamics that link current information to future residual income. Our empirical results generally support Ohlson's information dynamics. However, we find that our empirical implementation of Ohlson's model provides only minor improvements over existing attempts to implement the dividend-discounting model by capitalizing short-term earnings' forecasts in perpetuity.

ABSTRACT We examine the relative accuracy of management and analyst forecasts of annual EPS. We predict and find that analysts’ information advantage resides at the macroeconomic level. They provide more accurate earnings forecasts than management when a firm's fortunes move in concert with macroeconomic factors such as Gross Domestic Product and energy costs. In contrast, we predict and find that management's information advantage resides at the firm level. Their forecasts are more accurate than analysts’ when management's actions, which affect reported earnings, are difficult to anticipate by outsiders, such as when the firm's inventories are abnormally high or the firm has excess capacity or is experiencing a loss. Although analysts are commonly viewed as industry specialists, we fail to find evidence that analysts have an information advantage over managers at the industry level. The two have comparable abilities to forecast earnings for firms with revenues or earnings that are more synchronous with their industries.

ABSTRACT We investigate managers' decisions to supplement their firms' management earnings forecasts. We classify these supplementary disclosures as qualitative “soft talk” disclosures or verifiable forward‐looking statements. We find that managers provide soft talk disclosures with similar frequency for good and bad news forecasts but are more likely to supplement good news forecasts with verifiable forward‐looking statements. We examine the market response to these forecasts and find that bad news earnings forecasts are always informative but that good news forecasts are informative only when supplemented by verifiable forward‐looking statements, supporting our argument that these statements bolster the credibility of good news forecasts.

Patricia M. Dechow, Amy P. Hutton, Richard G. Sloan, Economic Consequences of Accounting for Stock-Based Compensation, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 34, Studies on Recognition, Measurement, and Disclosure Issues in Accounting (1996), pp. 1-20