Mandatory XBRL Adoption, Product Market Competition, and Information Environment

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of information processing cost on the quality of public information production by managers and analysts in the presence of product market competition. Using the staggered adoptions of XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) as a natural experiment, we identify and estimate the impact of XBRL’s lower information processing cost. The evidence shows that both managers and analysts are more consistent and accurate in forecasting earnings and that stock prices incorporate more firm-specific information, after XBRL implementations, especially in less competitive industries. These results are consistent with prior theoretical and empirical findings (Peress (2010), Kurlat and Veldkamp (2015), Gaspar and Massa (2006), Dong et al. (2016)).