Investors, regulators, academics, and researchers all emphasize the importance of financial statement comparability. However, an empirical construct of comparability is typically not specified. In addition, little evidence exists on the benefits of comparability to users. This study attempts to fill these gaps by developing a measure of financial statement comparability. Empirically, this measure is positively related to analyst following and forecast accuracy, and negatively related to analysts? dispersion in earnings forecasts. These results suggest that financial statement comparability lowers the cost of acquiring information, and increases the overall quantity and quality of information available to analysts about the firm.

We use changes in the value of a firm's real estate assets as an exogenous change in a firm's financing capacity to examine (1) the relation between reporting quality and financing and investment conditional on this change, and (2) firms’ reporting quality responses to the change in financing capacity. We find that financing and investment by firms with higher reporting quality is less affected by changes in real estate values than are financing and investment by firms with lower reporting quality. Further, firms increase reporting quality in response to decreases in financing capacity. Our findings contribute to the literature on reporting quality and investment, and on the determinants of reporting quality choices.

We investigate whether managers internalize the spillover effects of their disclosure on the stock price of related firms and strategically alter their disclosure decisions when doing so is beneficial. Using data on firm‐initiated disclosures during all‐cash acquisitions, we find evidence consistent with acquirers strategically generating news that they expect will depress the target's stock price. Our results suggest the disclosure strategy leads to lower target returns during the negotiation period when the takeover price is being determined and results in a lower target premium. These findings are robust to a battery of specifications and falsification tests. Our results are consistent with expected spillovers influencing the timing and content of firms’ disclosures in M&A transactions.

This paper examines the effect of transaction costs on the post–earnings announcement drift (PEAD). Using standard market microstructure features we show that transaction costs constrain the informed trades that are necessary to incorporate earnings information into price. This implies weaker return responses at the time of the earnings announcement and higher subsequent returns drift for firms with higher transaction costs. Consistent with this prediction, we find that earnings response coefficients are lower for firms with higher transaction costs. Using portfolio analyses, we find that the profits of implementing the PEAD trading strategy are significantly reduced by transaction costs. In addition, we show, using a combination of portfolio and regression analyses, that firms with higher transaction costs are the ones that provide the higher abnormal returns for the PEAD strategy. Our results indicate that transaction costs can provide an explanation not only for the persistence but also for the existence of PEAD.