When Google went public with a dual-class capital structure in which shares owned by the founders confer greater voting rights than shares issued to public investors, its cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, promised to provide investors with high-quality information about the company. Using the words of Warren Buffett, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, another dual-class firm, they promised shareholders, "We won't 'smooth' quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you." Page, Brin, and Buffett definitely understood the importance of quality information to their investors, especially in dual-class structures. But do dual-class companies really provide investors with credible financial information? Contrary to the assumption of agency theory that dual-class firms are less transparent, we find empirically that these companies do provide credible information to their investors. Our results suggest that the quality of financial reports, as measured by their ability to predict change in future earnings, is higher for dual-class companies than for their single-class counterparts. These findings may be explained by the unique relations created in dual-class firms in which the founders provide investors with higher-quality information in exchange for superior voting rights. The article contributes to the heated debate about the transparency of *Dr. Dov Solomon is an Associate Professor of Law and head of the Commercial Law Department and the LL.M. program at the College of Law and Business, Ramat Gan Law School. He served as a visiting scholar at the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance and the University of Michigan Law School. This article has been accepted for presentation at the American Law and Economics Association (ALEA) 2020 annual meeting, the European Association of Law and Economics (EALE) 2020 annual meeting, and the Accounting, Economics, and Law 2020 annual conference of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE). The authors would like to thank Uri Benoliel, Lisa Bernstein, John Shahar Dillbary and Kobi Kastiel for their insightful comments and discussions. **Dr. Rimona Palas is head of the Accounting Department at the College of Law and Business. ***Dr. Amos Baranes is head of the Information System Program at the Peres Academic Center.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.