We study the effects of disclosure in a dynamic market with imperfect competition. The supply of an asset is determined by a large shareholder with price impact, who trades slowly to diversify away from concentrated ownership. Small investors provide capital and thus risk-bearing capacity to the market. Although it is well known that disclosure impedes risk sharing by shifting risk before future trading opportunities, we show that disclosure, at the same time, can enhance risk sharing by promoting more trades. Resolving this tradeoff, an interior level of disclosure quality maximizes the small investors’ surplus as well as the total surplus, but minimizes the large shareholder’s surplus. Further, efficient disclosure policies feature increasing quality over time.

We study a corporate board tasked with monitoring a firm's CEO and providing incrementally decision-relevant information. The board has both compensation and non-pecuniary incentives—we label the latter board bias. Friendly boards have muted information gathering incentives, but can more effectively engage in cheap talk communication with management. As a result, the direction of the optimal board bias is determined by the CEO's initial information advantage: the board should be weakly friendly if the CEO is endowed with precise information, and weakly antagonistic (to the CEO) otherwise. Aside from assembling a friendly board, another way for shareholders to foster CEO/board communication is by granting the CEO more equity. In general, we find board friendliness and CEO equity grants to be positively associated, in equilibrium. This provides an optimal contracting rationale for an empirical regularity often interpreted as friendly boards facilitating rent extraction.