Investors in financial markets are often uncertain about the relationship intensity between firms and have to rely on firms’ disclosure of such relationship intensity. We analytically study the asset pricing implications of this relationship intensity uncertainty and how such uncertainty affects firms’ incentives to form and disclose their relationship intensities (i.e., the real implications). We find that while such disclosure has a positive price impact by increasing the expected cash flow, it also has a negative impact by reducing the diversification benefit of investing in multiple firms that have more correlated cash flows. The price impact upon relationship intensity disclosure is therefore not monotone: it increases with the expected benefit of relationship and decreases with the risk of the underlying relationship. Our analysis implies that mandatory disclosure of firm relationship intensities may both destroy relationship development and reduce investor welfare, i.e., has adverse real consequences.

We study the real effects of certification to demonstrate the value of mandatory certification over and above mandatory disclosure in enhancing investment efficiency. In our model, a firm's manager selects a project to maximize the firm's short‐term stock price, which is a function of her certification and disclosure decisions about the outcome of the project. Although the manager might be either forthcoming or strategic with regard to the disclosure of her private information, she can strategically choose whether to incur a cost or not to certify her disclosure, unless mandated. The manager always selects the first‐best project when both certification and disclosure are mandatory. However, when certification is voluntary, project selection is inefficient. In addition, mandating disclosure without mandating certification can lead to lower investment efficiency than mandating neither. In justifying why mandatory certification is beneficial for public firms, our results offer a note of caution regarding the contemplated regulatory moves for increased disclosures by public firms without corresponding certification requirements, for example, the recent SEC proposal requiring extensive climate‐related disclosure.

We develop a model to evaluate the costs and benefits of disclosing information about audit quality. Specifically, we examine whether audit quality disclosure affects auditors' effort and investors' investment efficiency. In our setting, an auditor exerts unobservable effort to influence audit quality and is motivated by liability in the event of audit failure. The usefulness of audited financial reports for investors depends on both the quality of the underlying financial reporting (e.g., as embodied by GAAP) and the quality of auditors' reports (i.e., the likelihood with which audit evidence uncovers managerial misreporting). We show that audit quality disclosure increases auditors' effort incentives if and only if the underlying financial reporting quality is relatively weak. We also show that such disclosure can actually reduce investment efficiency. Our analyses contribute to the debate about policies aimed at improving audit transparency.

Economists broadly agree that the economic burden of corporate taxes is not entirely borne by shareholders but also borne in part by employees and consumers. We examine corporate tax avoidance in a setting where shareholders do not bear the entire economic burden of the corporate tax. We show that the relation between corporate tax incidence and corporate tax avoidance depends on the elasticity of labor supply, the productivity of capital relative to labor, and the tax deductibility of labor and capital. These forces operate through two channels ( firm scale and input mix ), making the actual association between tax avoidance and incidence an empirical question. We find that firms whose shareholders bear less of the economic burden of corporate taxes engage in less avoidance. Our findings suggest that maximizing after‐tax profits might entail less tax avoidance if shareholders do not entirely bear the corporate tax burden. In particular, when the incidence of the corporate tax falls on the firm, firms avoid more taxes. This tendency is stronger if firms use a higher level of capital input, if the deductibility of the cost of capital investment is limited, if firms have high capital productivity, or if tax enforcement is strong.

We study the economic impacts of adopting harmonized accounting standards when firms’ investments exhibit beauty contest features. We model harmonized accounting standards as common/correlated noises in firms’ accounting reports. We show that while more harmonized accounting standards have ambiguous effects on the reports’ informativeness in representing firms’ underlying fundamentals, they always reduce their usefulness in forecasting aggregate investments. Therefore, the stronger the beauty contest features, the more important the forecasts about the aggregate investment, thus calling for less harmonized accounting standards. We also find that, absent beauty contest features, mandatory adoption of harmonized accounting standards can be unnecessary; however, such a mandate is warranted when beauty contest features are strong as firms, when left on their own, would not voluntarily do so. Taken together, our results provide both a justification for and identification of an unintended consequence of the recent mandates toward adopting harmonized accounting standards.

Corporate managers are often better informed than outside investors about the uncertain future benefits of investments. However, information about investment prospects is not verifiable and therefore not amenable to direct disclosure, but instead inferred by investors from other accounting disclosures. Given this situation, we study the normative question of how the market’s perceptions of uncertainty and its beliefs about the expected level of future benefits of investment should factor into mandatory financial reports of investment expenditures. We establish a threshold of uncertainty in future benefits beyond which it is better to aggregate investment expenditures with cash flow from ongoing operations, rather than measuring and reporting the two separately. We obtain the surprising result that the higher the expectation of future benefits, the lower this uncertainty threshold should be.