This paper demonstrates the crucial role that firms' mandatory disclosures play in determining their voluntary disclosure strategies. It also shows how a firm's propensity for providing voluntary disclosures relates to various features of the mandatory disclosure environment and disclosure regulation. The special case of choosing between aggregated and disaggregated disclosures serves as an illustration of the model's applicability. Copyright 2005 The Institute of Professional Accounting, University of Chicago.

While empirical evidence alludes to the intertemporal nature of corporate voluntary disclosures, most of the existing theory analyzes firms' voluntary disclosure decisions within single-period settings. Introducing a repeated, multiperiod, disclosure setting, we study the extent to which firms' strategic disclosure behavior in the past affects their prosperity to provide voluntary disclosures in the future. Our analysis demonstrates that by voluntarily disclosing private information firms make an implicit commitment to provide similar disclosures in the future, and therefore are less willing to voluntarily disclose information in the first place. This effect is expected to be of larger magnitude for firms (1) with a long history of absence of voluntary disclosures and an impressive past operating performance, or (2) that operate in a relatively stable and predictable business and information environment, or (3) whose managers have a long time horizon and a high degree of risk aversion.

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As different activities cannot be measured or communicated with the same precision, accounting information is often only a partial and unbalanced reflection of the fundamental economics, emphasizing certain aspects of the underlying operations while disregarding others. We highlight this inherent imbalance in information as the source of an interaction between corporate operating and discretionary disclosure strategies, and thereby also as an important determinant of the information acquisition strategy. We demonstrate that information imbalance, via its distorting effect on operating activities, leads to a reduction in the propensity of managers to acquire information and provide voluntary disclosures.