The Usefulness and Limited Supply of Disclosure Accessibility
研究了企业为何不愿投入资源提高披露可获取性，即使投资者视其为积极信号，并分析了可获取性与数字信号和文本披露质量的互动关系。
Firm disclosures are mostly unstructured and textual, imposing substantial processing costs on investors. We examine firms’ incentives to enhance the accessibility of these disclosures by expending resources to make them easier for investors to process. We show that an equilibrium with a positive supply of accessibility can be difficult to sustain—even though investors view accessibility as a favorable signal of firm productivity. We further explore how the supply of accessibility interacts with the quality of the numerical (easier-to-analyze) signals and textual (harder-to-analyze) disclosures. Our analysis generates predictions consistent with empirical evidence and offers a framework for evaluating policy initiatives and accounting standards aimed at improving accessibility. This paper was accepted by Ranjani Krishnan, accounting.