Lenders use information about loan applicants to predict whether a person is a good or bad credit risk; however borrowers express reservations about disclosing their personal information. In this paper we describe the design of a study in which we try to identify which data items have bigger privacy costs for individuals and whether it is possible to adjust lenders' data collection procedures i...

An effective risk management process enables a bank‘s management to measure and monitor risk, generate credible data, use sophisticated tools and provide fair value estimates, potentially of higher quality. Although the actual risk management process is unobservable to outsiders, disclosure relating to the risk management activities and corporate governance that monitors it reveals its effectiv...

Public disclosures can level information asymmetry in financial markets by removing informed traders’ advantage, or can exacerbate asymmetry by further increasing these traders’ knowledge of the firm. This study finds evidence of the latter phenomenon in earnings conference calls, where management releases new information, and financial analysts on the call immediately respond and question mana...

Nowadays, the need for privacy motivates the use of methods that permit us to protect a microdata file both minimizing the disclosure risk and preserving the statistical utility. Nevertheless, research is usually focused on how data utility is preserved, and much less research effort is dedicated to the study of the tools that an intruder might use to compromise the privacy of the data or, in o...

Disclosure limitation methods for protecting the confidentiality ofrespondents in survey microdata often use perturbative techniques whichintroduce measurement error into the categorical identifying variables. Inaddition, the data itself will often have measurement errors commonly arisingfrom survey processes. There is a need for valid and practical ways to assess theprotect...

Disclosures play an apparently critical role in the empirical regularity of the short-run momentum and long-run reversal in stock returns. Motivated by this evidence, this paper integrates an analysis of disclosures within an asset pricing model to arrive at a framework in which disclosures and asset returns are jointly determined. Disclosures resolve uncertainty, but the increased information ...

Young women with HIV and histories of physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood may be vulnerable to difficulties with disclosure to sexual partners. Abuse in childhood is highly prevalent in HIV-positive women, and has been associated with poorer communication, low assertiveness, low self worth, and increased risk for sexual and other risk behaviors that increase the risk of secondary transmis...

Background: APOE genotype provides information on risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but disclosure is discouraged. We examined the impact of APOE disclosure in a prospective randomized controlled trial: the Risk Evaluation and Education for Alzheimer’s Disease (REVEAL) Study. Methods: We randomly assigned 162 asymptomatic adult children of AD patients to Genotype Disclosure (GD) or G...

Dissemination of microdata files should be constrained to the confidentiality pledge under which a statistical agency collects survey data. To protect the confidentiality of respondents, statistical agencies perform a two-stage statistical disclosure control procedure. In the first stage, with respect to a disclosure scenario, the risk of disclosure of each unit is estimated. After the removal ...

This paper studies how information disclosure affects the cost of equity capital (i.e., risk premium) and investors welfare in a dynamic setting with overlapping generations of investors. Our analysis demonstrates that a firm’s cost of capital decreases (increases) in the precision of public disclosure if the firm’s growth rate is below (above) a certain threshold. The threshold growth rate is ...