【讲座时间】2023年6月27日  14:00

【讲座地点】BV韦德108室

【讲座主题】Voluntary Disclosure, Activist Communication and Intervention

【嘉宾介绍】贾雪，墨尔本大学会计学助理教授

Dr. Xue Jia is  an Assistant Professor in the Accounting Department at the University  of Melbourne. Her research uses economic models to understand the role  of information in financial markets, including how information  influences corporate control, shareholder litigation and firms’ cost of  capital. Her papers have been published in Management Science and  Journal of Accounting and Public Policy. Prior to joining the University  of Melbourne, Xue earned her doctoral degree from Tilburg University,  the Netherlands. She served as a Visiting Scholar at the Kellogg School  of Management, Northwestern University in 2015 and at the Tepper School  of Business, Carnegie Mellon University in 2016.

【内容提要】

Besides  hostile intervention, activist shareholders aiming to make changes in  target firms also use more friendly approaches such as communicating  with the firm management. Managers can strategically influence activist  shareholders’ perception about the firm and therefore their choice of  engagement. This paper analyses how a manager’s voluntary disclosure  strategy affects an activist shareholder’s strategic choice of engaging  with the firm either via communication or through direct intervention.  The manager prefers to withhold information when it induces more  communication from the shareholder. We find that depending on the threat  of intervention, the manager can choose to never disclose his private  information, or only disclose good news and withhold bad news to the  shareholder. The full nondisclosure and the partial disclosure  equilibria are sustained in our setting in the absence of any direct  disclosure frictions. Further analysis shows that although nondisclosing  firms are more likely to be targeted by the activist, they are likely  to experience more communication but less intervention from the activist  shareholder relative to disclosing firms.