The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulates and monitors companies to increase transparency and protect investors. The securities laws consider the companies’ interests and allow them to make requests to redact certain information in SEC filings and not publicly disclose …

Critics of mandatory public disclosure often argue that it may put disclosing firms at a competitive disadvantage by requiring them to  reveal potentially proprietary information to rivals. For instance, when the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) proposed to mandate more …

At first glance, recent progress towards transparency in corporate climate-risk disclosures seems exceptional. Over 2,000 companies now publish annual reports showing their carbon emissions data (although most self-interestedly omit Scope 3 data). Many (including most recently ExxonMobil) have made a …

Climate change is one of today’s most salient policy challenges. Under the Paris Agreement, 195 governments agreed to limit temperature increases to well below 2, preferably 1.5, degrees centigrade relative to pre-industrial levels. Since the magnitude of global warming is …

Financial markets affect the economy in a fundamental way by facilitating the creation of capital. The market for initial public offerings (IPO) – also known as the “primary market” – is especially important because it allows fast-growing and innovative companies …

Millions of investors rely on the disclosures of U.S. registered mutual funds in making their investment decisions, but some of the most influential industry opinion leaders and legal scholars have criticized the quality of those disclosures. Like public companies, mutual …

When it comes to financial disclosure, headline numbers are not all that matters. Equally important are what company executives talk about – and even how they talk about it. A large and growing body of literature in finance and accounting …

How companies determine executive compensation plays a critical role in corporate governance by helping recruit, motivate, and retain key employees. Not surprisingly, it has attracted broad attention from academics, investors, regulators, and the general public. In a recent study, we …

One of management’s many important roles is to provide information to market participants. However, this information may be self-serving rather than beneficial to the market, especially in the case of voluntary disclosure. To curb this possibility, boards of directors are …

On November 3, timed to coincide with the United Nation’s COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, the IFRS Foundation announced prototype global reporting standards for corporate climate and sustainability disclosures, and the formation of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) to …

For decades, there has been an important debate over how much securities regulators should focus on protecting small investors. The regulators themselves have generally aimed to create a level playing field among investors, and historically, new technology has been an …

Special purposes acquisition corporations (also known as SPACs or blank check companies) have received a lot of attention recently – and for good reason. SPACs accounted for more than half of U.S. IPOs in 2020, raising over $70 billion in …