 Calling for transparency: Evidence from a field experimentT.J. Wong, Gwen Yu, Shubo Zhang and Tianyu Zhang Journal of Accounting and Economics, 2024, vol. 77, issue 1 Abstract: We examine how firms respond to requests for enhanced disclosure that we make on an online investor platform. Exploiting variation in firms' customer and supplier disclosures, we ask a randomized set of non-disclosing firms to provide information on their customers' and suppliers' identities. We find that the firms' probability of disclosure depends on the basis we give for the demand—requests appealing to disclosure's usefulness to investors lead to more frequent disclosure, while those appealing to regulators' preference for disclosure lead to less frequent disclosure. The requests we make on the platform lead to more frequent customer- and supplier-related inquiries from other platform users. We also find that the treatment firms' disclosure of customer and supplier information improves in the next period's regulatory filings. The findings suggest that investor platforms can enhance corporate transparency by increasing retail investors' ability to demand information. Keywords: Investor online platforms; Retail investors; Disclosure; Customer and supplier information; Proprietary costs (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jaecon:v:77:y:2024:i:1:s0165410123000289 DOI: 10.1016/j.jacceco.2023.101604 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Accounting and Economics is currently edited by J. L. Zimmerman, S. P. Kothari, T. Z. Lys and R. L. Watts More articles in Journal of Accounting and Economics from Elsevier |
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