Following a 2008 rule change by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission designed to simplify and expand smaller firms’ abilities to raise public equity, small firms increasingly issue public equity via confidentially-marketed public offerings (CMPOs). CMPOs pair confidential pre-offering...

The sharp distinction drawn between firms rated narrowly above (BBB-) and below (BB+) the investment-grade cutoff provides variation in debt financing availability unrelated to firm fundamentals. We exploit this market segmentation to identify an asymmetric effect of debt capital supply on...

We examine the relation between disclosure quality and information asymmetry among market participants following an exogenous shock to macroeconomic risk. In 2015, the Swiss National Bank abruptly announced that it would abandon the longstanding minimum euro‐Swiss franc exchange rate. We find...

Prior research finds conflicting results on the impact of uncertainty on voluntary firm disclosure. Our paper sheds light on this relationship by addressing endogeneity concerns. To this end, we use a novel instrumentation strategy that exploits firms’ differential exposure to aggregate...

Using an experimental design that exploits exogenous reductions in coverage resulting from brokerage house mergers, we find that a reduction in coverage causes a deterioration in financial reporting quality. The effect of coverage on disclosure is more pronounced for firms with weak shareholder...

We examine the relation between disclosure quality and information asymmetry among market participants following an exogenous shock to macroeconomic risk. In 2015 the Swiss National Bank abruptly announced that it would abandon the longstanding minimum euro-Swiss franc exchange rate. We find...

We examine the consequences of the highly anticipated and controversial Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act, which mandates companies to disclose the CEO-to-median employee pay ratio starting from 2018. We address endogeneity concerns by using a regression discontinuity design around the public...