This paper examines how a firm adjusts its disclosure quality in response to technological innovations that improve investors' private information. We show that more precise private information can endogenously amplify supply shocks and, hence, increase noise-driven (or non-fundamental) price volatility. We study how the firm reacts to such changes and derive a necessary and sufficient condition under which the firm improves its disclosure quality when investors are informed with better private signals. We then apply our model to study investors' private word-of-mouth communication. Our analysis highlights a “dark side” of word-of-mouth communication and a call for better public disclosure even if private communication is assumed to be unbiased and truthful. We provide empirical predictions regarding how price volatility, market depth, and firms’ disclosure qualities would change as technological innovations, such as social media, facilitate information sharing among investors.

We investigate the impact of observing peers’ information acquisition on financial analysts’ allocation of attention. Using the timely disclosure mandate by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange as a setting, we find that, shortly after analysts observe that a firm has been visited by peer analysts, they reduce short‐term attention to that firm, as indicated by a reduced tendency to conduct follow‐up visits. Nonvisiting analysts who do not conduct follow‐up visits are more likely to discontinue coverage of the visited firm. These findings are consistent with the conjecture that the timely disclosure reveals the first‐mover advantage of visiting analysts, leading nonvisiting ones to reallocate their limited attention. We also find that, compared with the pre‐mandate period, the information environments of visited firms deteriorate immediately after an analyst's visit but not over the longer term. Further evidence suggests that the timely disclosure mandate has positive externalities in the form of increased immediate attention to and improved short‐term information environments of unvisited peer firms.

We investigate how incentives provided by whistleblowing programs affect the likelihood of whistleblowing, firm value, and social welfare in the presence of endogenous internal communication. Specifically, we focus on a myopic manager’s ex post decision on internal communication with the employee. An informed employee plays a dual role: working to fix the defect internally or acting as a whistleblower to expose the misconduct if the manager withholds defect information from the public. We find that, when the whistleblowing reward is relatively small, providing stronger incentives increases the likelihood of whistleblowing and can help improve firm value and social welfare. However, once rewards become excessively large and compromise internal communication, contrary to conventional wisdom, the likelihood of whistleblowing declines and both firm value and social welfare decline too. We also characterize the optimal whistleblowing rewards designed by strategic regulators seeking to maximize firm value or social welfare.

We study the role of reporting systems in the context of bank runs. In our model, a bank receives an early but imprecise estimate of its investment performance, and its financial reporting system generates a report. We find that, from a financial-stability standpoint, the optimal reporting system requires full disclosure when the bank’s early estimate is below a certain threshold, but no disclosure otherwise. Importantly, such optimal reporting threshold should be tailored to the bank’s exposure to bank-run risk. In particular, the threshold is nonmonotonic and U-shaped in the bank-run risk. We also relate our results to current accounting standards and discuss their implications for policy-making and empirical research.

We study the optimal information system in a debt contracting setting in which managers can engage in value destroying risk-shifting behavior. The information system issues early-warning signals that allow lenders to take corrective actions such as liquidating unprofitable projects. When managers are empire builders, the optimal system exhibits a conservative bias that leads to excessive early-warning signals and excessive project liquidations relative to first best. In contrast, when managers have a strong preference for a quiet life, the optimal system exhibits a liberal bias that leads to insufficient early-warning signals and excessive project continuations. The broad intuition is that excessive liquidations (continuations) impose costs on managers who have a preference for empire building (a quiet life), and these costs are more severe when managers take excessive risks. The bias in the information system therefore permits managers to commit not to engage in risk shifting and facilitates debt financing.

Firms that wish to raise capital from external investors can signal favorable private information about their long-term prospects by publicly adopting a liberal accounting system that increases the probability of an overstated financial report. All else equal, the liberal bias deteriorates investors' ability to make efficient investment decisions, which increases the firm's cost of raising capital as investors price protect. But the fact that the firm is willing to adopt such a bias signals booming long-term prospects, which ultimately allows the firm to raise capital at more favorable terms. We also study the effects of accounting standards that require firms to generate unbiased financial reports. Unbiased reporting leads to efficient investment decisions but prevents firms from signaling private information, which reduces their incentive to improve long-term prospects. We find that giving firms discretion over reporting choices is optimal in innovative industries, whereas enforcing unbiased reporting is optimal in traditional industries.

We examine whether the information content of the earnings report, as captured by the earnings response coefficient (ERC), increases when investors’ uncertainty about the manager's reporting objectives decreases, as predicted in Fischer and Verrecchia (2000). We use the 2006 mandatory compensation disclosures as an instrument to capture a decrease in investors’ uncertainty about managers’ incentives and reporting objectives. Employing a difference-in-differences design and exploiting the staggered adoption of the new rules, we find a statistically and economically significant increase in ERC for treated firms relative to control firms, largely driven by profit firms. Cross-sectional tests suggest that the effect is more pronounced in subsets of firms most affected by the new rules. Our findings represent the first empirical evidence of a role of compensation disclosures in enhancing the information content of financial reports.