Abstract

We study whether and how publicizing internal information affects the value of financial markets to the real economy. By publicizing corporate filings, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval) web platform reduces the cost of acquiring internal information for outsiders and so makes it relatively less attractive to gather external information. We find that the staggered introduction of EDGAR reduced the sensitivity of firm investment to prices, consistent with prices being less informative to managers due to the crowding out of external information gathering. This crowding out effect is stronger when outsiders’ incentives for gathering information are stronger and for firms that rely more on external information. Our findings suggest that policies designed to “level the playing field” by publicizing internal information can have significant unintended consequences by reducing the informativeness of prices for real decisions.

中文翻译：

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事半功倍：宣传信息和市场反馈*

摘要

我们研究了公开内部信息是否以及如何影响金融市场对实体经济的价值。通过公开公司文件，美国证券交易委员会（SEC）的EDGAR（电子数据收集，分析和检索）Web平台降低了为外部人员获取内部信息的成本，因此，收集外部信息的吸引力相对较小。我们发现，交错引入EDGAR会降低公司投资对价格的敏感度，这与由于外部信息收集的拥挤导致价格对管理人员的信息较少有关。当外部人收集信息的动机更强并且公司更依赖外部信息时，这种挤出效应会更强。