Do managers really guide through the fog? On the challenges in assessing the causes of voluntary disclosure

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dyer, Travis; Lang, Mark; Stice-Lawrence, Lorien
• 署名单位: University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ACCOUNTING & ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0165-4101
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jacceco.2016.08.001
• 发表日期: 2016
• 关键词: ANNUAL-REPORT READABILITY; Earnings persistence

摘要

Guay et al. (2016) document that firms with longer and more complex 10-Ks provide relatively more voluntary disclosure, which they interpret as evidence that managers use voluntary disclosure to mitigate negative. effects of complex mandatory disclosure. We review the results of Guay et al. and focus on two main challenges to inferring causality: (1) the coincidence of upward over-time trends in annual report length, complexity, and voluntary disclosure, and (2) the potential for omitted correlated variables, such as changes in firm economics, to drive changes in 10-K textual characteristics and voluntary disclosure. While the results in Guay et al. are extensive and robust, we argue that economic drivers of, and trends in, voluntary disclosure present important avenues for future research. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.