Financial Disclosure and Market Transparency with Costly Information Processing

We study a model where some investors (hedgers) are bad at information processing, while others (speculators) have superior information-processing ability and trade purely to exploit it. The disclosure of fi…nancial information induces a trade externality; if speculators refrain from trading, hedgers do the same, depressing the asset price. Market transparency reinforces this mechanism, by making speculators trades more visible to hedgers. As a consequence, issuers will oppose both the disclosure of fundamentals and trading transparency. This is socially inefficient if a large fraction of market participants are speculators and hedgers have low processing costs. But in these circumstances, forbidding hedgers access to the market may dominate mandatory disclosure.