This study examines how the quality of corporate disclosures impacts the precision of information that financial analysts incorporate into their forecasts of upcoming annual earnings. Our empirical measures distinguish between the precision of individual analysts' common and idiosyncratic (private) information, and between the quality of firms' public disclosures and private communications with analysts. We find that higher quality disclosures increase the precision of individual analysts' common and idiosyncratic information. These findings are due to higher quality annual and quarterly accounting disclosures. In contrast, we find no evidence that the quality of private communications between analysts and management affects the precision of analysts' common or idiosyncratic information.

This book provides a critical analysis of the evolution of corporate disclosure. Building upon prior academic literature, it assesses the most important changes in mandatory corporate disclosure, the growing relevance of social and environmental disclosure, and revolutionary new forms of corporate communication, in particular social media. It also includes empirical analyses that shed further light on the impact of voluntary communication, i.e. social and environmental reporting and corporate social media communication, on managerial and investment decisions. Lastly, it discusses new directions for accounting and corporate governance research on the theoretical and empirical challenges of corporate disclosure. Offering a wealth of relevant and timely advice, the book will help regulators design policies that allow businesses to overcome current and emerging economic, social, and technological challenges.

The essays collected here specifically examine the new trends of sustainability performance and reporting. They provide theoretical argumentation and evidence about sustainability performance, and determinants of its voluntary disclosure and external assurance. The book will interest companies, managers, shareholders, stakeholders and public bodies directly related to sustainability performance, the voluntary disclosure of sustainability information, and the adoption of an external assurance process.

From the perspective of corporate financial accounting, we examine empirically the impact of corporate financial factors on the voluntary disclosure of environmental information. Using a sample of 138 chemical industry listed companies in China, we find that more companies disclose environment information than before. From the statistical analysis, we also find that firm's size has stronger impact than debt to asset ratio and ROE on the behavior of environmental information disclosure. Further more our findings indicate that larger companies and those with better profitability are more likely to disclose environmental information.