No abstract

This paper investigates the relation between disclosure policy and market liquidity. Our tests examine two key aspects of market liquidity, the effective bid‐ask spread and quoted depth, and how they relate to financial analysts' ratings of firms' disclosure policies. We introduce a method of combining order sizes and depth quotes to yield more precise estimates of effective spreads on trades likely constrained by quoted depth. We find that while firms with higher rated disclosures are charged lower effective spreads, they are also quoted lower depth, consistent with the notion that better disclosures reduce information asymmetry but also cause some liquidity suppliers to exit the market. Therefore, a simple examination of spreads and depths yields ambiguous inferences on the relation between disclosure policy and market liquidity. We resolve this ambiguity by estimating depth‐adjusted effective spreads, and find that firms with higher rated disclosures have lower depth‐adjusted effective spreads across all trade sizes. Consequently, our results reveal a robust inverse relation between disclosure ratings and effective trading costs. This implies that a policy of enhanced financial disclosure is related to improved market liquidity.

We study the relation between the percentage of outstanding shares held by a firm's largest institutional owner and the bid–ask spread on that firm's shares, a measure of information risk. We find that the greater the percentage of shares held by the largest institutional investor, the greater the bid–ask spread in share prices. In contrast, the percentage of shares held by smaller institutional owners is related to lower bid–ask spreads. The results imply that only the largest of a firm's institutional owners—and no other institutional owner—is perceived to hold an information advantage. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This study examines how the quality of corporate disclosures impacts the precision of information that financial analysts incorporate into their forecasts of annual earnings. Our empirical measures distinguish between individual analysts' common and idiosyncratic (uniquely private) information precision, and between the quality of firms' public disclosures and the quality of their private communications with analysts. We find that higher quality disclosures increase the precision of analysts' common and idiosyncratic information. Further, we find that' the increased precision of analysts' idiosyncratic information is primarily due to higher quality annual and quarterly accounting-related disclosures, publicly available to all investors. These results suggest that higher-quality public information better enables analysts to generate idiosyncratic insights. We find no evidence to suggest that the quality of analysts' private communications with management impacts analysts' information precision after controlling for the quality of publicly available accounting information. In sum, the results suggest that when forming their annual earnings forecasts, analysts rely more heavily on publicly available financial data rather than privileged communications with management.