”Do institutional investors demand corporate disclosure? A central question in finance and accounting is whether corporate transparency benefits or hurts investors. This issue is complicated by the fact that information provision could affect groups of investors differentially. Public information may crowd out the private information advantage of some institutional investors; alternatively, investors, particularly those following more passive trading strategies, may not be information sensitive. However, even passive institutional investors may benefit from an increase in monitoring by other stakeholders following improved disclosure. Further, regardless of the preferences of institutional investors, whether or not they are able to affect corporate policy on this margin is unclear. This tradeoff is reflected in mixed empirical evidence on the relationship between institutional ownership and corporate disclosure.
To address this tradeoff faced by institutional investors, we analyze the revealed preference for corporate disclosure by institutional investors and the associated impact on the information content of corporate disclosure. Empirically, identifying a causal effect of institutional ownership on corporate disclosure policy is difficult because experimental settings and direct measures of corporate disclosure quantity and characteristics are scarce. We propose a two-part solution to these problems. First, we utilize exogenous changes in institutional ownership around Russell 2000 index reconstitutions in a regression discontinuity design to identify the effect of institutional ownership on corporate disclosure policy. Second, we directly measure the characteristics of corporate disclosure using a novel data set composed of all 8-K filings between 1996 and 2006.
