I investigate capital market consequences of an increase in prescribed timeliness of firms' mandatory disclosure of material events. Specifically, I examine an SEC regulatory change that accelerates the Form 8-K filing deadline and classifies 8-Ks as likely to be constrained or unconstrained by the increase in prescribed timeliness. After the regulatory change, firms filing constrained 8-Ks exhibit increases in information asymmetry between investors and investor disagreement at the 8-K filing date relative to firms filing unconstrained 8-Ks. Moreover, the relative increases in information asymmetry and investor disagreement for firms filing constrained 8-Ks appear to be attributable to a decline in the length of and quantitative information included in 8-K disclosures. My findings shed light on the costs of a prescriptive approach to enhanced disclosure timeliness of ongoing disclosure. Data Availability: Data are available from public sources cited in the text.

We compare the earnings information produced by the five largest forecast data providers (FDPs)—Bloomberg, Capital IQ, FactSet, I/B/E/S, and Zacks—and observe substantial differences across FDPs in both forecasted and actual street earnings values, and thus the earnings surprise, for the same firm‐quarter. We provide evidence that differences in the earnings surprise across FDPs for the same firm‐quarter (i.e., “FDP differences”) have economically meaningful implications for price responsiveness and liquidity around earnings announcements. We also find that, for announcements where FDPs disagree about whether the announcing firm missed or beat earnings expectations, investors are more likely to side with higher‐quality FDPs but may not fully impound the implications of FDP quality differences during the announcement window. On average, relative to the other FDPs, I/B/E/S ranks highly in our measure of FDP quality, such that investor reactions are likely to align with I/B/E/S earnings information, validating its use as a representative FDP in academic research. Taken together, our results are consistent with FDPs pursuing differentiated information production strategies that generate capital market frictions when these strategies lead to material FDP differences.

We document multiple dimensions of usefulness of banks' interest income sensitivity disclosures. First, we find management-generated sensitivity measures are predictive of future realized changes in net interest income. Second, we find financial analysts' forecasts of net interest income reflect information provided by interest income sensitivity disclosures. Third, we find equity market responses to interest rate shocks as well as firms' interest rate betas are larger for banks with greater disclosed sensitivity of net interest income to interest rate changes. Across all of these tests, the informativeness of income sensitivity measures is incremental to that of regulatory data. These results suggest that interest income sensitivity disclosures are informative measures of interest rate risk. Our results contradict assertions that these disclosures are useless due to lack of relevance of income sensitivity, poor modeling techniques, and/or redundancy relative to regulatory data.

This study examines managers’ strategic use of concurrent disclosures around the announcement of negative material events. We predict and find that managers disclosing negative 8-K news are more likely to issue a concurrent press release about an unrelated event relative to a press release providing additional context for the 8-K–triggering event in order to increase investor information processing costs. This strategy appears distinct from the bundling of news to deter litigation. We find that managers more commonly issue concurrent unrelated press releases when they have stronger incentives to impede the pricing of negative information and that doing so is associated with a reduction in the speed with which prices reflect the news. Our findings shed light on a previously unexplored tool managers use to exploit investors’ processing capacity constraints to “hide” negative news.