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- October 2021
- Article
Shareholder Activism and Firms' Voluntary Disclosure of Climate Change Risks
By: Caroline Flammer, Michael W. Toffel and Kala Viswanathan
This paper examines whether—in the absence of mandated disclosure requirements—shareholder activism can elicit greater disclosure of firms’ exposure to climate change risks. We find that environmental shareholder activism increases the voluntary disclosure of climate...
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Keywords:
Transparency;
Reporting;
Shareholder Engagement;
Shareholder Activism;
Climate Change;
Risk and Uncertainty;
Environmental Management;
Investment Activism;
Corporate Disclosure;
Communication Strategy;
Information Publishing;
Measurement and Metrics;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Problems and Challenges;
United States
- July 2021
- Article
Material Sustainability Information and Stock Price Informativeness
By: Jody Grewal, Clarissa Hauptmann and George Serafeim
As part of the SEC’s revision of Regulation S-K, many investors proposed the mandatory disclosure of sustainability information in the form of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data. However, progress is contingent on collecting evidence regarding which...
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Keywords:
Voluntary Disclosure;
Accounting Standards;
Sustainability;
Nonfinancial Information;
Corporate Social Responsibility;
Stock Price Informativeness;
Synchronicity;
Environmental Sustainability;
Corporate Disclosure;
Corporate Accountability;
Stocks;
Price;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Accounting;
Standards
- 2021
- Working Paper
Equilibrium Effects of Pay Transparency
By: Zoë B. Cullen and Bobak Pakzad-Hurson
The public discourse around pay transparency has focused on the direct effect: how workers seek
to rectify newly-disclosed pay inequities through renegotiations. The question of how wage-setting
and hiring practices of the firm respond in equilibrium has received...
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- May 2021
- Article
Is No News (Perceived as) Bad News? An Experimental Investigation of Information Disclosure
By: Ginger Zhe Jin, Michael Luca and Daniel Martin
This paper uses laboratory experiments to directly test a central prediction of disclosure theory: that strategic forces can lead those who possess private information to voluntarily provide it. In a simple sender-receiver game, we find that senders disclose favorable...
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- 2021
- Article
Consumer Disclosure
By: Tami Kim, Kate Barasz and Leslie John
As technological advances enable consumers to share more information in unprecedented ways, today’s disclosure takes on a variety of new forms, triggering a paradigm shift in what “disclosure” entails. This review introduces two factors to conceptualize consumer...
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- Article
Value of New Performance Information in Healthcare: Evidence from Japan
By: Susanna Gallani, Takehisa Kajiwara and Ranjani Krishnan
Mandatory measurement and disclosure of outcome measures are commonly used policy tools in
healthcare. The effectiveness of such disclosures relies on the extent to which the new information produced by the mandatory system is internalized by the healthcare...
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- November–December 2020
- Article
Lifting the Veil: The Benefits of Cost Transparency
By: Bhavya Mohan, Ryan W. Buell and Leslie K. John
Firms do not typically disclose information on their costs to produce a good to consumers. However, we provide evidence of when and why doing so can increase consumers’ purchase interest. Specifically, building on the psychology of disclosure and trust, we posit that...
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- 2020
- Article
Research on Corporate Sustainability: Review and Directions for Future Research
By: Jody Grewal and George Serafeim
We review the literature on corporate sustainability and provide directions for future research. Our review focuses on three actions: measuring, managing and communicating corporate sustainability performance. Measurement is the least developed of the three and...
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Keywords:
Sustainability;
Sustainability Reporting;
Sustainability Management;
Nonfinancial Disclosure;
Nonfinancial Information;
Nonfinancial Performance;
Materiality;
ESG;
ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance;
ESG Disclosure;
ESG Disclosure Metrics;
ESG Ratings;
ESG Reporting;
Inequality;
Corporate Social Responsibility;
Accounting;
Finance;
Management;
Strategy;
Environmental Sustainability;
Climate Change;
Diversity;
Equality and Inequality;
Corporate Disclosure;
Measurement and Metrics;
Corporate Governance;
Corporate Accountability;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact
- August 2020
- Article
Strategies for Managing the Privacy Landscape
By: Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Andres Hervas-Drane
Firms use consumer personal information to improve their products and services. Personal information is open to misuse, however, and when exploited for undesired or unexpected purposes reduces consumer’s trust in the firm and their willingness to provide personal...
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- June 2020
- Article
Lazy Prices
By: Lauren Cohen, Christopher J. Malloy and Quoc Nguyen
We explore the implications of a subtle "default" choice that firms make in their regular reporting practices, namely that firms typically repeat what they most recently reported. Using the complete history of regular quarterly and annual filings by U.S. corporations...
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- March 2020
- Article
Voluntary, Self-Regulatory, and Mandatory Disclosure of Oil and Gas Company Payments to Foreign Governments
By: Paul M. Healy and George Serafeim
Concerns about high rates of government corruption in resource-rich countries have led transparency advocates to urge oil and gas firms to disclose payments to host governments for natural resources. Transparency, they argue, can increase government accountability and...
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- 2020
- Working Paper
The Bulletproof Glass Effect: When Privacy Notices Backfire
By: Aaron R. Brough, David A. Norton and Leslie John
Firms typically provide assurances to consumers about data management practices in the form of privacy notices. This manuscript proposes that ironically, such assurances can fuel rather than alleviate privacy concerns. Indeed, we show that consumers react to assurances...
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- February 2020
- Article
Tales of Two Motives: Disclosure and Concealment
By: Leslie John, Michael L. Slepian and Diana Tamir
We posit that the desire to disclose personal information, and the desire to conceal it, are related yet distinct psychological motives. People often wish to conceal information, such as embarrassing aspects of the self. Yet people also seek to reveal information, such...
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- November 9, 2019
- Article
Effect of Revealing Authors' Conflicts of Interests in Peer Review: Randomized Controlled Trial
By: Leslie K. John, George Loewenstein, Andrew Marder and Michael Callaham
Objective: To assess the impact of disclosing authors’ conflict of interest declarations to peer reviewers at a medical journal.
Design: Randomised controlled trial.
Setting: The study was conducted within the manuscript review process at the... View Details
Design: Randomised controlled trial.
Setting: The study was conducted within the manuscript review process at the... View Details
- 2019
- Chapter
The Consequences of Mandatory Corporate Sustainability Reporting
By: Ioannis Ioannou and George Serafeim
A key aspect of the governance process inside organizations and markets is the measurement and disclosure of important metrics and information. In this chapter, we examine the effect of sustainability disclosure regulations on firms’ disclosure practices and...
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Keywords:
Mandatory Disclosure;
Mandatory Reporting;
Sustainability;
Corporate Social Responsibility;
Social Impact;
Valuation;
China;
South Africa;
Europe;
Asia;
Regulation;
Corporate Disclosure;
Integrated Corporate Reporting;
Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Corporate Governance;
China;
Denmark;
Malaysia;
South Africa
- 2019
- Working Paper
Undisclosed Debt Sustainability
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
Over the past decade, non–Paris Club creditors, notably China, have become an important source of financing for low- and middle-income countries. In contrast with typical sovereign debt, these lending arrangements are not public, and other creditors have no information...
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- September 2019
- Article
The Effect of Enforcement Transparency: Evidence from SEC Comment-Letter Reviews
By: Miguel Duro, Jonas Heese and Gaizka Ormazabal
This paper studies the effect of the public disclosure of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) comment-letter reviews (CLs) on firms’ financial reporting. We exploit a major change in the SEC’s disclosure policy: in 2004, the SEC decided to make its CLs...
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- July 2019
- Article
Market Reaction to Mandatory Nonfinancial Disclosure
By: Jody Grewal, Edward J. Riedl and George Serafeim
We examine the equity market reaction to events associated with the passage of a directive in the European Union (EU) mandating increased nonfinancial disclosure. These disclosures relate to firms’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance and would be...
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Keywords:
Nonfinancial Information;
Nonfinancial Performance;
ESG;
ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance;
Investor Behavior;
Disclosure;
Disclosure Regulation;
Regulation;
Sustainability;
Corporate Performance;
Information;
Corporate Disclosure;
Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms;
Performance;
Environmental Sustainability;
Corporate Governance;
Outcome or Result
- May 2019
- Article
Who Consumes Firm Disclosures? Evidence from Earnings Conference Calls
By: Anne Heinrichs, Jihwon Park and Eugene F. Soltes
Using a set of proprietary records, we examine who consumes quarterly earnings conference calls and under which circumstances the calls are consumed. While there is significant interest in calls by institutional investors and sell-side analysts, we find that investors...
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- April 2019
- Article
Shooting the Messenger
By: Leslie John, Hayley Blunden and Heidi Liu
Eleven experiments provide evidence that people have a tendency to “shoot the messenger,” deeming innocent bearers of bad news unlikeable. In a preregistered lab experiment, participants rated messengers who delivered bad news from a random drawing as relatively...
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