Disclosure processing costs, investors' information choice, and equity market outcomes: A review

• 成果类型: Review
• 署名作者: Blankespoor, Elizabeth; deHaan, Ed; Marinovic, Ivan
• 署名单位: University of Washington; University of Washington Seattle; Stanford University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ACCOUNTING & ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0165-4101
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jacceco.2020.101344
• 发表日期: 2020
• 关键词: earnings announcement promotions; financial-statement presentation; annual-report readability; corporate governance; capital-markets; stock returns; institutional investors; voluntary disclosure; limited attention; Textual analysis

摘要

This paper reviews the literature examining how costs of monitoring for, acquiring, and analyzing firm disclosures - collectively, disclosure processing costs - affect investor information choices, trades, and market outcomes. The existence of disclosure processing costs means that disclosures are not public information as traditionally defined, but instead can be a form of costly private information. Conceptualizing disclosures as private information makes it clear that learning from disclosures is an active economic choice and that disclosure pricing cannot be perfectly efficient. We review the analytical and empirical literature on sources of processing costs and how these costs affect equity market outcomes, primarily within rational equilibria. We also discuss studies of the feedback effects of investors' processing costs on managers' choices about disclosure and corporate actions. We conclude that disclosure processing costs have implications for a wide array of accounting research and phenomena, but we are only just beginning to understand their effects. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.