This article reconciles a disparity between one of Hughes and Kao's (1991) predictions on the effects of firm disclosures regarding future benefits of R&D spending and evidence of reductions in R&D spending pursuant to SFAS No. 2 reported by Horowitz and Kolodny (1980) and others. By assuming Bertrand price competition in place of Cournot quantity competition, it is shown that equilibrium R&D expenditures by risk‐averse duopolists will be lower when firm disclosures are uninformative about R&D outcomes than when they are informative. This result is especially useful in that price competition appears to be descriptive of competition in high technology industries. Résumé. Les auteurs réussissent à concilier l'une des prédictions de Hughes et Kao (1991) portant sur l'incidence de l'information présentée par l'entreprise au sujet des avantages futurs des dépenses de R‐D, et l'évidence de la réduction des dépenses de R‐D depuis l'entrée en vigueur du SFAS n***o 2, dont font état Horowitz et Kolodny (1980) ainsi que d'autres chercheurs. En substituant l'hypothèse de Bertrand relative à la concurrence axée sur le prix à celle de Cournot relative à la concurrence axée sur la quantité, les auteurs démontrent que les dépenses de R‐D au point d'équilibre engagées par des entreprises en situation de duopole qui présentent une aversion pour le risque sont plus faibles lorsque l'information présentée ne renseigne pas sur les résultats découlant des dépenses de R‐D que lorsque l'information présentée renseigne sur ces résultats. Cette conclusion est particulièrement utile du fait que le prix semble bien être l'objet de la concurrence que se livrent les entreprises des secteurs de haute technologie.

This paper considers the effects of different rules regarding research and development (R&D) costs on competition in oligopolistic industries. It is shown that the consequences of those regimes on equilibrium levels of R&D spending depend on the impact of R&D on marginal costs and the risk attitudes of firm managers. Further results speak to the self‐selection of disclosure policies and the effects of those policies on social welfare. Generally speaking, the results are useful in forming predictions concerning the economic consequences of Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 2 and in explaining the information exchange activities of trade associations in high‐technology R&D industries. Résumé. Les auteurs analysent les conséquences de différentes règles relatives à la présentation de renseignements relatifs aux coûts de la recherche et du développement sur la concurrence dans les secteurs d'activité oligopolistiques. Ils établissent que les conséquences de la structure oligopolistique sur les niveaux d'équilibre des dépenses de recherche et de développement dépendent de l'incidence de ces activités sur les coûts marginaux et de l'attitude des cadres à l'égard du risque. Les auteurs tirent en outre des conclusions quant à l'autosélection de politiques relatives à la présentation de renseignements et aux conséquences de ces politiques sur l'intérêt de la société. Dans l'ensemble, les résultats de l'étude peuvent servir à l'élaboration de prédictions relatives aux conséquences économiques de la norme Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 2 et expliquer les activités d'échange d'information des associations commerciales dans les secteurs où la recherche et le développement technologiques sont importants.

John S. Hughes, Dennis E. Logue, Richard James Sweeney, Corporate International Diversification and Market Assigned Measures of Risk and Diversification, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1975 Proceedings (Nov., 1975), pp. 627-637

Previous research argues that earnings quality, measured as the unsigned abnormal accruals, proxies for information asymmetries that affect cost of capital. We examine this argument directly in two stages. In the first stage, we estimate firms' exposure to an earnings quality factor in the context of a Fama‐French three‐factor model augmented by the return on a factor‐mimicking portfolio that is long in low earnings quality firms and short in high earnings quality firms. In the second stage, we examine whether the earnings quality factor is priced and whether insider trading is more profitable for firms with higher exposure to that factor. Generally speaking, we find evidence consistent with pricing of the earnings quality factor and insiders trading more profitably in firms with higher exposure to that factor.

An interesting question in assessing value relevance of accounting variables is whether measures of value relevance are materially affected by market inefficiencies. We explore this question in two steps: First, we analytically examine the impact of market inefficiencies on the estimation of coefficients in value relevance regressions and derive a procedure that corrects potential biases caused by such inefficiencies. The procedure adjusts contemporaneous stock prices for future risk adjusted price changes, and yields value relevance coefficient estimates that capture both contemporaneous and delayed market reactions. Second, we apply this procedure to three types of studies that have attracted much attention in the accounting literature: 1) the value relevance of earnings and book values; 2) the value relevance of residual income value estimates; and 3) the value relevance of accruals and cash flows. We compare coefficient estimates obtained from conventional value relevance regressions with those from regressions employing our adjustment procedure, and find statistically significant differences in both level and return regression coefficient estimates. The magnitude of differences in coefficient estimates for return regressions is large enough to affect economic inferences. We find that coefficients of lagged price deflated residual income value estimates move significantly closer toward a predicted value of one implying a meaningful reduction of bias. Last, we find that cash flows now have significantly larger coefficient estimates than accruals consistent with their greater persistence.

We use a rational expectations model to examine how public disclosure requirements affect listing decisions by rent-seeking corporate insiders, and allocation decisions by liquidity traders seeking to minimize trading costs. We find that exchanges competing for trading volume engage in a ‘race for the top’ whereunder disclosure requirements increase and trading costs fall. This result is robust to diversification incentives of risk-averse liquidity traders, institutional impediments that restrict the flow of liquidity, and listing costs. Under certain conditions, unrestricted liquidity flows to low disclosure exchanges. The consequences of cross-listing also are modeled.

A firm seeks to raise capital in credit markets to fund risky operating activities. The firm has private information about the future cash flows from such activities. Firm owners delegate operating decisions to a manager who privately learns further information about the distribution of those cash flows subsequent to contracting, but before taking actions. Those actions include the selection of which operating activities to pursue and how much hidden effort to exert. At issue initially after introducing the problem is the efficient design of the manager's compensation as a device for signaling private information to lenders as well as for inducing operating decisions. Our results provide conditions under which a Bayesian Nash separating equilibrium satisfying the Cho–Kreps intuitive criterion exists. Broadly speaking, these results suggest that contracts that resolve internal adverse selection and moral hazard problems may serve as signaling devices in efficiently resolving information asymmetries with external parties. Next, we show how earnings-based debt covenants and the selection of conservative accounting methods may eliminate signaling costs altogether.

We examine effects of government actions and related accounting policies on the corporate bond market implied by changes in relations between aggregate bond returns and cash flow and discount rate news. We capture the influence of risk by partitioning bonds into investment and speculative grades. We use earnings changes as a proxy for cash flow news and T-Bill rate changes as a proxy for discount rate news. As expected, during non-crisis periods, we observe a positive relation between earnings changes and bond returns and a negative relation for T-Bill rate changes. A combination of government bailouts of large financial institutions and mark-to-market accounting preserves the positive relation for earnings changes during the crisis for investment grade bonds, while absence of these factors leads to an insignificant relation for speculative grade. Intervention by the Federal Reserve to induce lower interest rates as earnings were declining, a flight to safety shifting demand from corporate bonds to T-Bills, and low cost funds invested in risk free investments explain a reversal of the relation between bond returns and T-Bill rate changes for both grades.