A standard result in the voluntary disclosure literature is that when the manager's private information is a signal correlated with the firm's liquidation value, mandatory disclosures substitute for voluntary disclosures. In this paper, we assume that the manager's private information complements the mandatory disclosure and show that the content and likelihood of a voluntary disclosure depend on whether the mandatory reports contain good or bad news. This different information asymmetry produces new, testable implications regarding the probability of and market reaction to voluntary disclosures. We also show that changes in mandatory disclosure regulations can have unintended consequences due to their effects on the manager's willingness to voluntarily provide supplemental disclosures.

Since 1995, managers of thousands of firms have voluntarily disclosed the expected date of their firm’s next quarterly earnings announcement to Thomson Financial Services Inc. These disclosures are approximately 500% more accurate than the simple time–series expected report dates used in prior accounting research. These disclosures are also informative. On average, managers who miss their own expected date eventually report earnings that fall about one penny per share below consensus forecasts for each day of delay. Investors respond by sending the price of late–announcing stocks down at the missed expected report date and continue to send them down as the reporting delay lengthens, consistent with our “day late, penny short” result. Despite this, we find that the market response at the time earnings are announced still depends on whether the announcement is early, on time, or late relative to the firm’s own expected report date.

We examine how an auditor’s ability to terminate a multi‐period client relationship provides the auditor with a real option whose value depends on the nature of informational asymmetry between the incumbent and other potential auditors. In particular, we isolate conditions under which the auditor’s private and public sources of information behave as complements rather than substitutes. In such circumstances, increasing the likelihood of publicly provided information induces the auditor to expend more (rather than less)resources in private information gathering activities.