This study investigates the real effects of management communication, specifically of forecasts or earnings guidance , on investment. Managers can signal the strength of their projects through accuracy in their earnings guidance. This leads less accurate managers to distort their investments; the equilibrium investment strategy involves over‐investment when earnings exceed the forecast and under‐investment when earnings fall short. Moreover, we find that managers are pessimistic in their forecasts, which helps to explain the corresponding well‐documented empirical regularity. This downward bias increases the likelihood of investment manipulation but decreases the real loss from distortion. Interestingly, the over‐investment induced by earnings guidance helps to mitigate the classic under‐investment problem for a myopic manager with unobservable investment. Earnings guidance can therefore be value‐increasing when managerial myopia is severe.

We study a dynamic voluntary disclosure setting where the manager’s information and the firm’s value evolve over time. The manager is not limited in her disclosure opportunities, but disclosure is costly. The results show that the manager discloses even if this leads to a price decrease in the current period. The manager absorbs this price drop in order to increase her option value of withholding disclosure in the future. That is, by disclosing today, the manager can improve her continuation value. The results provide a number of novel empirical predictions regarding asset prices and disclosure patterns over time. These include, among others, that disclosures are negatively correlated in time, and stock return skewness is negatively correlated with lagged returns for firms with low uncertainty over their future profitability, in more competitive industries, and in industries with less informative public news.

Firms with correlated fundamentals often issue reports sequentially, leading to information spillovers. The theoretical literature has investigated multifirm reporting, but only when firms report simultaneously. We examine the implications of sequential reporting, where firms aim to maximize their market price and can manipulate their reports. The introduction of sequentiality significantly alters the biasing behavior of firms and the resulting informational environment relative to simultaneous reporting. In particular, a lead firm always manipulates more when reports are issued sequentially. Moreover, relative to simultaneous reporting, sequential reporting reduces the overall information available to the market about each firm, resulting in less efficient and less volatile prices. Additionally, we find that stronger correlation in firm fundamentals can amplify the lead firm’s incentive for manipulation under sequentiality, in contrast to simultaneous reporting. We offer further results regarding, for example, market response coefficients, and provide a number of empirical implications.