Line of Business Reporting and Security Prices: An Analysis of an SEC Disclosure Rule: Comment

In an earlier article in this Journal, Horwitz and Kolodny reported that imposition of the SEC's line of business reporting requirements did not affect investors' assessments of the riskiness of multisegment firms. We suggest that shortcomings in their sample-selection and hypothesis-testing procedures may have led to this result. Our empirical analyses indicate that the LOBUR disclosure did convey useful information to investors and that the average effect was a downward shift in their assessment of a multisegment firm's market riskiness.