1992 年 43 巻 3 号 p. 258-265
This paper examines the economic role of mandatory disclosure in a noisy rational expectations model. Many theoretical studies of discretionary disclosure suggest that firms never have the incentive to spend less on disclosure than is socially optimal and offer no support for mandatory disclosure regulations.
This paper, however, derives the paradoxical result that mandatory disclosure may increase the social surplus even when firms have the incentive to spend more on disclosure than is socially optimal. The reason is that mandatory disclosure may increase the cost of disclosing too much information and discourage firms from making this overdisclosure decision.