Risk Disclosure, Liquidity, and Investment Efficiency

In this paper, I study the impact of a firm’s risk disclosure on investors’ desire to acquire information about the firm. I first show that risk disclosure complements private learning by enabling sophisticated investors to acquire information when it is most lucrative to do so, thereby reducing liquidity. Next, in a setting in which investors possess information regarding the profitability of the firm’s potential investments, I show that risk disclosure affects the firm’s investment efficiency by influencing the usefulness of the information that the firm derives from its share price. Finally, I demonstrate that risk disclosure can reduce the firm’s expected level of investment and therefore its expected risk.