This article analyzes how mandatory accounting disclosure is grounded on different rationales for private and public companies. It also explores technological changes, such as computerised databases and the Internet, which have recently made disclosure of company accounts by small companies potentially less costly and more valuable, thanks to electronic filing and universal online access to cre...

In this paper, we examine the incentives for firms to voluntarily disclose otherwise private information about quality attributes of differentiated products when those products have multiple attributes and consumers are heterogeneous in their tastes over these attributes. In particular, we focus on whether the so-called “unraveling result”—in equilibrium, firms fully disclose the quality of the...