In 2005, the SEC suffered a high‐profile loss in its first court case, SEC v. Siebel Systems, Inc. , in an effort to enforce Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD). We examine the impact of this loss on managers' selective disclosure to sell‐side analysts. We provide evidence that the informativeness of analyst reports increased after the Siebel decision, especially for observable instances of private meetings. This finding suggests that such selective disclosure increased significantly after the court's decision. Our results also suggest that the increased selective disclosure faded as the SEC resumed enforcement actions related to Reg FD in 2009. In exploratory analyses, we survey and interview law firm partners to investigate possible mechanisms for our results; their responses suggest that the Siebel outcome reduced manager concern about liability from selective disclosure. Collectively, our results highlight how the anticipated costs of regulatory enforcement affect private information flow from managers to analysts in particular.

This study examines the effect of restrictions on managers' outside employment opportunities on voluntary corporate disclosure. The recognition of the Inevitable Disclosure Doctrine (IDD) by courts in the U.S. states in which the firms are headquartered places greater restrictions on their managers from joining or forming a rival company. We find that, on average, the IDD adoption increases the asymmetric withholding of bad news. We further show that the IDD adoption increases the asymmetric withholding of bad news relative to good news for firms whose managers are mainly concerned about losing their current job. However, an opposite effect is observed for firms whose managers are mainly interested in seeking promotion elsewhere. Furthermore, these effects are less pronounced for firms subject to greater monitoring of their disclosure policy. These results suggest that managers' career concerns affect corporate disclosure policy, and the effect varies with the type of career concerns.

This study examines how competition affects the profitability of mutual funds’ trading on the post earnings announcement drift (PEAD). Our results show that among funds actively pursuing this strategy, only those that manage to avoid competition deliver superior performance. Further, we find that funds avoid competition by investing in illiquid stocks. Our analysis shows that the outperformance of these low-competition funds is mainly attributable to their information advantage in identifying mispricing among illiquid stocks.