Research Interests
- We examine whether mandatory pay-transparency regulation influences women’s participation in innovation. When women are absent from invention teams, research priorities shift away from conditions that disproportionately affect women. Using the UK’s gender pay gap (GPG) disclosure mandate as a quasi-natural experiment, we compare firms exposed to the mandate with otherwise similar firms below the reporting threshold. We find that treated firms increase the share of female inventors by 0.84 percentage points, a 59 percent increase relative to the pre-mandate mean. Greater female inventor presence after the mandate is associated with increases in patent quantity, citation-based quality, grant rates, and knowledge breadth. Most notably, high-female firms produce higher shares of female-oriented inventions, suggesting that disclosure regulation can redirect technological progress toward historically underserved populations. Overall, we provide novel evidence that non-financial disclosure mandates can broaden the inventive frontier.
- We study how firms’ disclosure strategies, i.e., smoothing and bundling, affect users’ information acquisition behavior. We define smoothing as the disclosure of events that occur on the same day across different filing dates, and bundling as the disclosure of events that occur on different days on a single filing date. Examining non-earnings 8-Ks from 2002 to 2017, we find that smoothed 8-Ks attract more daily and monthly downloads, consistent with mere exposure theory. Bundled 8-Ks attract more downloads on the filing day but this effect dissipates within a month, suggesting that bundling boosts short-term information acquisition but may contribute to information overload in the long run. Moreover, the short-term positive effect of bundling is more pronounced for good news, despite that bad news usually attracts more attention. Finally, the impact of disclosure strategies on information acquisition varies across mandatory versus voluntary 8-Ks and across 8-K item types, with users’ stronger reactions to the strategic disclosure of 8-K events whose timing is less under managerial control.
- We examine the effect of acquirer shareholder voting requirements on voluntary disclosure and voting outcomes in M&A transactions. We find that voting requirements lead acquirer firms to provide more voluntary disclosure and in a timelier manner, including disclosure of the merger agreement, information on expected synergies, post-merger earnings forecasts, fairness opinions, and conference calls. We also document that more disclosure in the presence of voting requirements reduces bid-ask spreads and triggers sales from transient institutional investors, changing firms' shareholder base. Both effects increase the likelihood that the transaction is completed. Our findings are consistent with managers of acquirer firms providing voluntary disclosure to reduce investors' asymmetric information about the transactions and increase the likelihood of deal approval. Evidence from falsification tests and a regression discontinuity design supports the causal interpretation of our results. Our findings suggest that the benefits of shareholder voting in M&As extend beyond improved deal selection, operating through an information-disclosure channel that complements traditional governance and screening mechanisms.
- We define narrative conservatism as narratives reflecting bad news in a timelier, more news-consistent, and more complete manner than good news. Using a sample of Form 8-K filings from 1993 to 2020, we find that narrative disclosure is conservative. 8-Ks are filed faster, their tone is more news-consistent, and they contain more filings, items, exhibits, and graphs in response to bad news than to good news. We document higher narrative conservatism in voluntary 8-Ks and in settings where managers have more incentives to disclose bad news. In addition, we find narrative conservatism in quarterly reports as well, especially within the MD&A section and higher narrative conservatism for firms with low conditional conservatism.