Proprietary Costs and Corporate Lobbying Against Changes in Mandatory Disclosure

The author thanks the members of her dissertation committee, Marcus Kirk, Paul Madsen, Jay Ritter, and Jenny Tucker (chair), for invaluable guidance and support. The author also thanks Suraj Srinivasan (the editor), an associate editor, two anonymous referees, Stephen Asare, Matthew Cedergren (discussant), Will Ciconte, Johannes Impink, Todd Kravet, Mark Maffett (discussant), David Reppenhagen, Kathy Rupar, Steve Utke, David Weber, Yanhua Sunny Yang, and seminar participants at Baruch College, Drexel University, Georgia State University, the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Management University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Florida, the 2016 American Accounting Association Annual Meeting, and the 2018 Financial Accounting and Reporting Section Midyear Meeting for helpful comments. She is grateful to Young Jun Cho for sharing a list of firms with pure reporting changes related to the adoption of SFAS 131 and Feng Li for sharing his competition data. All data are available from public sources. This paper was previously circulated under the title “Evaluating the competitive harm of mandatory disclosure of proprietary information: Evidence from the adoption of SFAS no. 131.”