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Between 2000 and 2003 a series of disclosure and analyst regulations curbing abusive financial reporting and analyst behavior were enacted to strengthen the information environment of U.S. capital markets. We investigate whether these regulations reduced security mispricing and increased stock market efficiency. After the regulations, we find a significant reduction in short-term stock price continuation following analyst forecast revisions and earnings announcements. The effect was more pronounced among higher information uncertainty firms, where we expect security valuation to be most sensitive to regulation. Analyst forecast accuracy also improved in these firms, consistent with reduced mispricing being due to an improved corporate information environment following the regulations. Our findings are robust to controls for time trends, trading activity, the financial crisis, analyst coverage, delistings, and changes in information uncertainty proxies. We find no concurrent effect among European firms and a regression discontinuity design supports our identification of a regulatory effect.

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Unlike prior research that focuses on determinants of firm‐specific stock price crashes (SPCs), we study the consequences of SPCs on market information efficiency. The tension underlying our research question stems from two competing explanations. As an unanticipated shock, an SPC could stimulate (distort) information efficiency by triggering investor rational attention (opinion divergence). Our identification strategy involves a difference‐in‐differences analysis in which SPC firms in the treatment sample are propensity score matched with non‐SPC firms in the industry‐peer control sample, as well as placebo tests for falsification. Consistent with the stimulation effect, we find an increase of the earnings response coefficient and a decrease in post‐earnings announcement drift, from the pre‐ to post‐SPC period, for SPC firms, but not for non‐SPC firms. Further analyses reveal that SPC firms attract increased investor attention, as reflected in greater analyst coverage and more investor access to firms' online financial filings following such an event. Using mutual fund flow redemption pressure based on hypothetical sales as an exogenous shock to SPCs, we provide evidence corroborating our causal interpretation of the main findings. Collectively, the evidence suggests that SPCs can attract increased investor attention, bringing about positive externalities by stimulating market information efficiency.

No abstract