Three Essays on the Consequences of Transparency

Three Essays on the Consequences of Transparency
Author: Tobias Witter
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023*
Genre:
ISBN:

Englische Version: This dissertation comprises three essays which empirically investigate consequences of transparency. The first essay investigates how transparency, demanded by the government as a customer of firms, affects firms' financial reporting. It provides evidence that, relative to firms without government customers, government suppliers have a higher quality of financial reporting. Findings indicate that government procurement requirements, which are linked to internal control over financial reporting, can positively affect the external information environment of firms. The second essay examines how managers react to a stricter transparency mandate in pension accounting, if this mandate increases the expected volatility of balance sheet items. Managers of affected firms change decisions on pension plans which mitigate volatility and in addition, affected firms exhibit less volatile accruals but more volatile discretionary real actions suggesting managers reduce volatility in balance sheets. Findings imply that a transparency mandate in pension accounting may have (unintended) consequences for managerial decision-making if the mandate reveals more economic volatility on balance sheets. The third essay studies how (data-transparently) researchers visualize their quantitative findings and how this affects the impact of academic work. It finds that, compared to articles in field-specific economics journals, articles in economics journals with a broader audience use more figures than tables and that articles visualizing (data-transparently) with figures receive more citations. An online experiment, which manipulates how a fictive study visualizes scientific results, finds that participants assess the internal validity of research as being higher and are more willing to cite research if it visualizes results data-transparently. The findings imply that (data-transparent) visualization can enhance the impact of academic work.

Lifting the Veil: Essays on Firm Transparency and Consumer Behavior

Lifting the Veil: Essays on Firm Transparency and Consumer Behavior
Author: Bhavya Mohan
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2016
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ISBN:

This research examines the effects of firm transparency on consumer behavior. Three essays investigate how consumer behavior changes when firms are transparent about costs, wages, and promotional strategies. Essay one investigates when and why firms benefit from revealing confidential unit cost information to consumers. A natural field experiment conducted with an online retailer suggests that cost transparency can boost sales. Subsequent controlled lab experiments replicate this basic effect and provide evidence for why it occurs. Essay two examines whether consumer behavior is influenced by the disclosure of a firm's pay ratio - the ratio of the total compensation of the CEO to the average annual compensation of all other employees. Pilot field data and a series of experiments show that pay ratio disclosure affects the purchase intentions of a subset of consumers, via perceptions of wage fairness. Essay three examines how marketing offers that are framed as percentages can confuse consumers, due to highly non-linear impacts in terms of actual value. Three lab studies and one field experiment show that while even highly numerate consumers are prone to error, the transparent provision of rate information can help consumers evaluate offers more accurately.

Three Essays on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of Entrepreneurial Firms

Three Essays on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) of Entrepreneurial Firms
Author: Yefeng Wang
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
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ISBN:

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a broad management concern, it is not only critical to every aspect of modern business practice, but is also deeply incorporated into a company's daily operations via its values, norms, and decision-making process, etc. While there is an ever-increasing number of studies on CSR, many researchers have treated CSR as one single broad construct, its individual dimensions have been largely neglected. This dissertation takes the opportunity to address CSR by focusing on two dimensions: diversity and governance of three different entrepreneurial entities including clean-technology ventures, family firms in the United States and companies operate in emerging markets. In the first essay, I explore the impact of board diversity, female director representation, to be specific, on venture performance in the context of the clean-tech industry. I posit that appointing female board of directors can help clean-tech ventures overcome legitimacy constraints. I also examine the moderating effect of venture size and environmental ideology, such that this impact is stronger for small firms, and it is stronger for clean-tech ventures operating in a high level of environmental ideology state. In the second essay, I investigate how family involvement influences corporate diversity and how does corporate governance mechanism moderate such effect. The results suggest that family involvement decreases the overall corporate diversity, but family firms present more diversity-related concerns than non-family firms. Meanwhile, I suggest that the adoption of dual-class share decreases family firms' overall diversity. My third essay addresses the question of how corporate governance affect environmental information transparency directly and indirectly through seeking external verification, as well as how the legal and business environment moderates these relationships. I find that companies with strong corporate governance mechanisms are more likely to pursue external verification to alleviate traditional agency conflicts in the emerging markets. In addition, strong internal corporate governance leads to high environmental transparency directly and indirectly via seeking external verification. The legal and business environments moderate these relationships. Overall, these three essays in hopes of filling the gaps in the literature and advance the research in the areas of CSR, corporate governance, and entrepreneurship studies.

Three Essays on Corporate Disclosure and Information Externalities

Three Essays on Corporate Disclosure and Information Externalities
Author: Yetaotao Qiu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation includes three essays on corporate disclosure and information externalities. In the first essay, I examine the disclosure behavior of rival firms identified by an Initial Public Offering (IPO) candidate during the IPO quiet period when the IPO candidate is restricted in its communication. I find that the tone of disclosures made by identified rivals becomes more positive during the quiet period, and reverses after the quiet period ends. The strategic disclosure behavior is mainly driven by identified rivals' concerns over product market competition. I also find that this behavior hurts the IPO candidate and benefits the identified rivals. In the second essay, I investigate the relations between IPO firms' peer choice and peer information environment. I find that IPO firms tend to select peer companies with a better information environment, and this effect is more pronounced for IPO firms with greater information uncertainties. I also find support that peer information environment is positively associated with upward offering price revision, post-offering analyst coverage, and negatively associated with the number of amendment filings. Overall, this essay shows that IPO firms can make use of the externalities of peer information to facilitate their initial public offerings. In the third essay, I switch my focus from intra-industry relations to supply chain relations. More specifically, I study the effects of layoff announcements by customers on the valuation and operating performance of their supply chain partners. I find that suppliers experience a negative stock price reaction around their major customers' layoff announcements. The negative price effect is exacerbated when industry rivals of layoff-announcing customers also suffer from negative intra-industry contagion effects. Moreover, these supply chain spillover effects are asymmetric, with only "bad news" layoff announcements causing significant value implications for suppliers, but not "good news" announcements. Supplier firms also reduce their investment in and sales dependence on layoff-announcing customers in subsequent years. Keywords: Disclosure; Product market competition; IPO quiet period; Identified rivals; Information externalities; Peer information environment; Corporate layoffs, Supply chain relations; Stock market return

The Strategic Value of Sustainability and Its Disclosure

The Strategic Value of Sustainability and Its Disclosure
Author: Samuel Touboul
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN:

The signaling perspective argues that when a firm limits the extent of its sustainability disclosure, it prevents stakeholders from evaluating its achieved degree of sustainability performance, and may thus reach higher financial returns. However, transparency is an institutionalized norm that stakeholders value, and firms may not be able to limit their disclosure without being penalized. This thesis therefore raises the question of whether firms can strategically limit their sustainability disclosure to reach higher profits, or if pressure for conformity to the norm of transparency exists and weakens such strategies. Using econometrical methods, this thesis empirically shows that sustainability raters do not converge in their assessment of firms' sustainability performance, supporting the assumption that firmsmay prevent stakeholders from evaluating their actual degree of sustainability. It also shows that less sustainable and more reputed firms are more likely to limit their sustainability disclosure, that highly sustainable firms encounter higher short and long term financial returns when they adopt an extensive disclosure, and that less sustainable firms, on the contrary are more profitable in the short term when theylimit their disclosure. This thesis therefore shows that in line with the signaling perspective, firms may strategically adjust the extent on their disclosure to reach higher returns in the short term. However, in the long term, normative pressure for transparency is too high and weakens the benefits of such strategies.

Three Essays on Corporate Information Communications

Three Essays on Corporate Information Communications
Author: Junqi Liu
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021
Genre:
ISBN:

This dissertation consists of three essays that focus on corporate external communication of accounting information. My dissertation's primary goal is to understand better how firms' financial disclosure behaviors change in response to various internal and external forces. To achieve this goal, I use empirical archival methods and employ several unique settings to examine the influences of three particular forces on firms' financial disclosure activities. Specifically, in the first essay, I focus on a firm's internal production function and ask whether labor cost stickiness shapes income smoothing activities. By contrast, the second and third essays explore the influences of two external factors, namely product market competition with existing rivals and the local information environment, respectively, on firms' mandatory and voluntary disclosure behaviors.