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  • February 2018
  • Article
  • Review of Finance

Financial Disclosure and Market Transparency with Costly Information Processing

By: Marco Di Maggio and Marco Pagano
  • Format:Print
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Abstract

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 financial 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, asset sellers 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.

Keywords

Financial Disclosure; Information Processing; Liquidity; Market Transparency; Rational Inattention; Information; Financial Liquidity; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Corporate Disclosure; Financial Markets; Investment

Citation

Di Maggio, Marco, and Marco Pagano. "Financial Disclosure and Market Transparency with Costly Information Processing." Review of Finance 22, no. 1 (February 2018): 117–153.
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About The Author

Marco Di Maggio

Finance
→More Publications

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  • Compound: Lending on the Blockchain By: Marco Di Maggio, George Gonzalez and Richard Dulude
  • Breaking Barriers: How Brex is Shaping the Future of Financial Services for Startups By: Marco Di Maggio, James Barnett and Susie L. Ma
  • The Credit Supply Channel of Monetary Policy Tightening and Its Distributional Impacts By: Joshua Bosshardt, Marco Di Maggio, Ali Kakhbod and Amir Kermani
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