Litigation Risk and Voluntary Disclosure: Evidence from Legal Changes
利用三个法律事件带来的诉讼风险外生变化，研究发现企业在预期诉讼风险降低时会减少管理层盈利预测，风险升高时则增加，且主要针对负面消息的预测。
ABSTRACT This paper documents that changes in litigation risk affect corporate voluntary disclosure practices. We make causal inferences by exploiting three legal events that generate exogenous variations in firms' litigation risk. Using a matching-based fixed-effect difference-in-differences design, we find that the treated firms tend to make fewer (more) management earnings forecasts relative to the control firms when they expect litigation risk to be lower (higher) following the legal event. The results are concentrated on the earnings forecasts conveying negative news and are robust to alternative specifications, samples, and outcome variables. JEL Classifications: D80; G14; K22; K41; M41.