This study examines companies with two classes of shares that entitle their holders to identical cash flow and voting rights but that are available to mutually exclusive sets of investors: A shares to domestic investors and B shares to foreign investors. Price differences between A and B shares are higher in firms with a greater disparity in the disclosures that they make to domestic and foreign investors. This association is more pronounced when the cost (benefit) of information transfer is higher (lower). The results suggest that disclosure disparity creates meaningful differences in investors' average information precision across A and B shares and thus influences the cross-sectional variation in price differences.

Survey evidence indicates widely held managerial beliefs that earnings volatility is negatively related to earnings predictability. In addition, existing research suggests that earnings volatility is determined by economic and accounting factors, and both of these factors reduce earnings predictability. We find that the consideration of earnings volatility brings substantial improvements in the prediction of both short- and long-term earnings. Conditioning on volatility information also allows one to identify systematic errors in analyst forecasts, which implies that analysts do not fully understand the implications of earnings volatility for earnings predictability.