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The Accounting Review Vol. 94 No. 5 2019

Litigation Risk and Voluntary Disclosure: Evidence from Legal Changes

Joel F. Houston1; Chen Lin2; Sibo Liu3; Lai Wei3

1 University of Florida · 2 The University of Hong Kong · 3 Lingnan University

Abstract

This paper documents that changes in litigation risk affect corporate voluntary disclosure practices. We make causal inferences by exploiting three legal events that generate exogenous variations in firms' litigation risk. Using a matching-based fixed-effect difference-in-differences design, we find that the treated firms tend to make fewer (more) management earnings forecasts relative to the control firms when they expect litigation risk to be lower (higher) following the legal event. The results are concentrated on the earnings forecasts conveying negative news and are robust to alternative specifications, samples, and outcome variables.

DOI
10.2308/accr-52355
Volume
94
Issue
5
Pages
247-272
Language
en
Sources
openalex bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref

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