Disclosures and asset returns

Abstract

Public information to financial markets often arrives through the disclosures of interested parties who have a material interest in the reactions of the market to the new information. When the strategic interaction between the sender and the receiver is formalized as a disclosure game with verifiable reports, market prices observed in equilibrium can be given a simple characterization that relies only on the fact value of the announcement. Also, this characterisation predicts that the return variance following a bed outcome is higher than it would have been if he outcome were good. When investors are risk averse, this leads to negative serial correlation of asset returns