We examine a duopolistic setting in which firms can preannounce their future competitive decisions before they actually implement them. We show that there is a unique equilibrium in which both firms preannounce and overstate their future actions when uncertainty of demand is low. We find that firms choose higher real actions than the ones they would choose in the absence of preannouncements. Moreover, the real actions of both firms are single-peaked functions of their credibility. In a Cournot market, firms face a prisoner's dilemma in which preannouncing lowers firms' profits. If firms could commit not to preannounce, they would remain silent. In a Bertrand market, firms overstate their future actions to foster collusion.

We examine the impact of increasing whistleblowing bounties on whistleblowers' strategy and regulatory efficiency in detecting fraud. Our analysis shows the regulator extracts information about the incidence of fraud from whistleblowers' actions, and the quality of such information depends on the size of whistleblowing bounties. With a larger bounty, upon receiving a whistleblowing report, the quality of the regulator's information about fraud deteriorates, whereas upon observing no whistleblowing, the information quality about no fraud improves. Although the informational improvement upon no whistleblowing has not been widely discussed, we demonstrate it is a key determinant of the optimal whistleblowing program. We show, considering the informational value of whistleblowing and no whistleblowing, the regulator should set the bounty to encourage more whistleblowing when the prior belief of fraud is stronger and the insider is better informed. Our analysis generates policy and empirical implications for designing and studying whistleblowing programs.

In this study, we show that when a firm needs external financing, information quality has real effects via financing contracts on the firm's input to influence its operational outcome. Interestingly, we find that higher information quality decreases overall efficiency. Our analysis highlights the importance of considering the role of information quality in the presence of the firm's input decision upon financing contracts. In particular, information quality has a feedforward effect on the firm's real input decision via financing contracts, which in turn has a feedback effect on financing contracts and overall efficiency.

We examine whether stress tests distort banks' risk‐taking decisions. We study a model in which a regulator may choose to rescue banks in the event of concurrent bank failures. Our analysis reveals a novel coordination role of stress tests. Disclosure of stress‐test results informs banks of the failure likelihood of other banks, which can reduce welfare by facilitating banks' coordination in risk‐taking. However, conducting stress tests also enables the regulator to more effectively intervene banks, coordinating them preemptively into taking lower risks. We find that, if the regulator has a strong incentive to bail out, stress tests improve welfare, whereas if the regulator's incentive to bail out is weak, stress tests impair welfare.

In this paper, we investigate the real effects of information transparency in crowdfunding markets. Our analysis shows that the crowdfunding market features an under‐implementation inefficiency, driven by two types of uncertainty that consumers face: fundamental uncertainty about the entrepreneur's implementation cost, and strategic uncertainty due to potential coordination failures among consumers. We find that when both fundamental and strategic uncertainties are present, eliminating the fundamental uncertainty alone by revealing the implementation cost does not necessarily improve efficiency. Surprisingly, from an ex ante perspective, greater transparency makes the coordination among crowdfunding consumers less efficient, which makes the under‐implementation problem even worse and thus impairs efficiency. Our findings send a message of caution against promoting greater transparency in the crowdfunding market.

This paper examines banks' choice between fair-value and historical-cost accounting when reported accounting information is used in capital requirement regulation. We center our analysis on a key difference between fair-value and historical-cost accounting: the frequency with which asset value changes are reported. We show that the elasticity of banks' loan returns to aggregate lending is a critical determinant of the interaction between capital adequacy requirements and accounting choices. If lending returns are inelastic, then higher capital requirements reduce fair-value usage. By contrast, higher capital requirements encourage fair value if capital requirements are low and lending returns are sufficiently elastic. In equilibrium, banks may elect different accounting choices, and we find that mandating uniform adoption of historical cost (fair value) is desirable when capital requirements are loose (tight). Our study offers many other implications about fundamental links between accounting and prudential choices.

We study the interaction between interbank competition and accounting information quality and their effects on banks' risk-taking behavior. We identify an endogenous false-alarm cost that banks incur when forced to sell assets to meet capital requirements. We find that when the interbank competition is less intense, an improvement in the quality of accounting information encourages banks to take more risk. Keeping the banks' investments in loans constant, the provision of high-quality accounting information reduces the false-alarm cost of assets sales and improves the discriminating efficiency of the capital requirement policy. When considering the banks' endogenous investment decisions, however, this improvement in discriminating efficiency causes excessive risk-taking, because banks respond by competing more aggressively in the deposit market, and the increase in deposit costs motivates banks to take more risk. Our paper shows that improving information quality increases risk-taking with mild competition, but has no effect under fierce competition.