Robert E. Verrecchia, On Timing and Selectivity: Discussion, The Journal of Finance, Vol. 41, No. 3, Papers and Proceedings of the Forty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the America Finance Association, New York, New York, December 28-30, 1985 (Jul., 1986), pp. 730-732

In this paper we investigate a firm's decision to redact proprietary information from its material contract filings. Information redaction results when the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) grants a firm's request to withhold information from investors in its material contract filings, presumably because the information is proprietary. We hypothesize that when firms redact information, measures of adverse selection deteriorate. That is, the redaction of proprietary information from material contracts should be associated with: a larger adverse selection component of the bid‐ask spread, reductions in market depth, and lower market turnover. In addition, we conjecture that the decision to redact depends on whether the firm plans on raising capital, the competitiveness of the firm's industry, and the performance of the firm. Overall the results of our analysis generally support our predictions. We find that when firms redact information, contemporaneous measures of the adverse selection component of the bid‐ask spread rise, and market depth and share turnover deteriorate; this suggests an increase in adverse selection. We also find firms are less likely to redact when they issue long‐term debt and are more likely to redact when they are in a competitive industry or experience losses.

Stanley Baiman, Robert E. Verrecchia, The Relation Among Capital Markets, Financial Disclosure, Production Efficiency, and Insider Trading, Journal of Accounting Research, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 1-22

Public announcement, Preannouncements of information, Private information, Price reaction

We suggest that transparent bias in management disclosures may result from managers processing information in a heuristic, as distinct from Bayesian, fashion when they face imperfect or head-to-head competition. We predict that transparent bias in disclosures is positively related to the extent of head-to-head competition. In addition, when disclosure is discretionary, we show that managers who exhibit viable, heuristic behavior are less likely to disclose than managers who exhibit Bayesian behavior. Finally, when disclosure is discretionary, we show that the increase in the proportion of uninformed managers who exhibit viable, heuristic behavior encourages more disclosure by an informed manager.

We characterize the steady-state equilibrium in which informed traders who exhibit heuristic (i.e., representativeness, as opposed to Bayesian) and Bayesian behaviors achieve the same expected utility. Then, we show how the endogenous, steady-state proportion of heuristic traders is affected by the quality of public information and other exogenous features of our model. Finally, we discuss how the presence of heuristic traders potentially alters the link between improved public disclosure and market liquidity, the variance in the change in price, and market efficiency.

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We formalize the effects of an earnings disclosure on security prices under an assumption of limited liability. We derive various nonlinear relations between equity prices and earnings under a variety of capital structure assumptions and. if possible, we tie the relations attained to results from the existing empirical literature. We also characterize how debt prices respond to earnings when holders of debt have limited liability. Finally, we analyze how changes in the degree of leverage and conversion features of debt affect the relation between price and earnings.