Book Description

This dissertation contains three essays. In the first essay, I document that disclosure of financially immaterial environmental and social (E&S) information has material effects on firms' investment and financing decisions using the staggered introduction of 87 country-level regulations that mandate firms report such information. Firms domiciled in countries that mandate E&S transparency increase R&D expenditures and patenting activity after disclosing. Transparent non-financial disclosure reduces financing frictions, resulting in more innovation for equity-dependent firms and increased reliance on external equity. It also improves shareholders' contracting and monitoring abilities, incentivizing managers to invest in innovation. Fixed capital investment, which is less sensitive to information frictions, does not change following E&S disclosure. Additionally, I only observe changes to investment and financing decisions when E&S disclosure is mandatory--highlighting the unique value of consistent and comparable disclosure. In the second essay, I study venture capital firms (VCs) use of public market information and how attention to this information relates to their private market investment outcomes. I link web traffic to public disclosure filings hosted on the Security and Exchange Commission's (SEC's) EDGAR server to individual VCs. VCs analyze public information before most deals. An increase in EDGAR filing views relates positively to the probability of an exit through acquisition, suggesting that public information helps identify paths to acquisition. The effect is stronger when the VC has less access to private information. I conclude that policymakers should consider spillover effects on private markets when setting public disclosure requirements. In the third essay, we identify analysts' information acquisition patterns by linking EDGAR server activity to analysts' brokerage houses. Analysts rely on EDGAR in 24% of their estimate updates, with an average of eight filings viewed. We document that analysts' attention to public disclosure is driven by the demand for information and the analysts' incentives and career concerns. We find that information acquisition via EDGAR is associated with a significant reduction in analysts' forecasting error relative to their peers. This relationship is likewise present when we focus on the intensity of analyst research. Attention to public information further enables analysts to provide forecasts for more time periods and more financial metrics. Informed recommendation updates are associated with substantial and persistent abnormal returns, even when the analyst accesses historical filings. Analysts' use of EDGAR is associated with longer and more informative analyses within recommendation reports.