This paper examines whether managers can reduce the detrimental effects of information overload by spreading out, or temporally smoothing, disclosures. We begin by attempting to identify managerial smoothing. We find that when there are multiple disclosures for the same event date, managers spread the disclosures out over several days. Managers are also more likely to delay a disclosure when there has been a disclosure made within the three days before the event date. Finally, managers are more likely to engage in disclosure smoothing when disclosures are longer, the information environment is more robust, firm information is complex, uncertainty is high, and disclosure news is more positive. Our second set of analyses examines whether there are market benefits to disclosure smoothing. Using two different measures of disclosure smoothing, we find that smoothing is associated with increased liquidity, reduced stock price volatility and increased analyst forecast accuracy.

We examine how personal lending relationships between lenders and managers are affected by information and accounting environments of borrowing firms. We address this question by exploring whether, following managerial turnover, lenders migrate with the manager from the firm where a relationship developed (origin firm) to the manager's new firm (destination firm). We find that the opacity of the external information environment of the destination firm significantly increases the probability of lenders' co-migration, while accounting irregularities at both the destination and origin firms decrease it. We also show that co-migration is affected by a lender's monitoring efficiency. A lender's monitoring efficiency increases its co-migration probability when a manager moves to an opaque firm, but not when she moves to a transparent one. When the destination or origin firm experiences accounting irregularities, even lenders with strong monitoring capabilities are mostly reluctant to continue their relationship with a migrating manager.