Credibility of Voluntary Disclosure in Financial Firms

Abstract

Financial firms are more vulnerable to the investors’ lacking in confidence, and a speculative run could happen when all investors lose their confidence and withdraw simultaneously. In addition to the existing discussions on endogenous misreporting cost such as reputation, propriety and social norm effects, this paper demonstrated that the threat of speculative run can serve as an endogenous misreporting cost which prevents the bank manager from lying in their voluntary disclosures. Hence, voluntary disclosures such as management earnings forecast can be informative, and the degree of information revelation will be positively related to depositors’ perspectives on the random investment shock.