No abstract

With the adoption of Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD), market behavior around earnings releases displays no significant change in return volatility (after controlling for decimalization of stock trading) but significant increases in trading volume due to difference in opinion. Analyst forecast dispersion increases, and increases in other measures of disagreement and difference of opinion suggest greater difficulty in forming forecasts beyond the current quarter. Corporations increase the quantity of voluntary disclosures, but only for current quarter earnings. Thus, Reg FD seems to increase the quantity of information available to the public while imposing greater demands on investment professionals.

We study the associations between openness to foreign equity investors and the information environment facing emerging market firms. Changes in openness are reflected in legal, regulatory, and cross-listing events, the fraction of stock available to foreign investors, and the size of U.S. portfolio capital flows. The information environment is reflected in firm-specific return volatility and in indicators of information production, uncertainty, and disagreement related to earnings announcements. We find that information measures typically increase with openness to foreign equity investment, particularly in the form of security cross-listings and aggregate portfolio flows.JEL Classifications:

We investigate how chief executive officers’ (CEOs) risk incentive (VEGA) affects firm innovation. To establish causality, we exploit compensation changes instigated by the FAS 123R accounting regulation in 2005 that mandated stock option expensing at fair values. Our identification tests indicate a positive and causal effect of CEOs’ VEGA on innovation activities. Furthermore, dampened managerial risk-taking incentive after the implementation of FAS 123R leads to a significant reduction in innovation related to firms’ core business and explorative inventions. It implies that managers diversify their innovation portfolios and decrease explorative inventions to curtail business risk when their risk-taking incentive is reduced.