Voluntary disclosure of a company performance and the market reaction

Abstract

In today's world, the disclosure of information by a firm affects its position in the financial markets. Enterprises contact investors utilizing reporting about certain events. For this purpose, both official financial reports and less regulated communication channels, such as the company's website on the Internet, personal meetings, or social networks, can be used. The relevance of this research result is primarily due to the increased attention of investors to voluntary disclosures rather than mandatory ones. By studying a sample of companies in the automotive industry from the United States and Europe, we found out that making positive and negative voluntary disclosures on the annual return on shares of these companies. The paper reports that this effect is significant: while it increases the shares' annual yield with positive disclosures and decreases with negative ones.