Historical Accounting and the Endogenous Credibility of Current Disclosures
研究历史财务报告如何作为事后检查确保自愿披露的可信度，通过模型分析惩罚威胁对卖方诚实披露的作用，对会计监管和披露政策制定者有参考价值。
This paper examines how historical financial reporting can serve as an ex post check on more timely voluntary disclosures, and shows that such a check can be sufficient to ensure that the voluntary disclosures are credible most of the time. The model describes an adverse selection setting where an informed seller communicates with an uninformed buyer over time, but there is no exogenous means of making the seller's communication credible. The addition of an ex post report enables the buyer to assess the accuracy of the seller's prior communications and gives the buyer a means to punish a seller who has disclosed falsely in the past. Under certain conditions, this threat of punishment keeps the seller honest in the present most of the time. The model provides a formal means of evaluating the Lundholm (1999) proposal that accounting regulation should turn its attention to supporting credible voluntary disclosures by reporting on the accuracy of past estimates.