Evolutionary Model of Existing Competition and Voluntary Disclosure

Abstract

We analyze how, in the absence of capital market incentives, the influence of existing competition on voluntary disclosure is an evolving process which has a non-monotonic design. The progressive capability of rivals to forecast significant information and the increasing losses of abnormal profits during the industry life cycle generate fears and incentives that change the sign of the relationship between competition and the probability of voluntary disclosure throughout the industry’s development. We support this new design empirically by applying a semi-parametric Cox model to 28 years of archival data for the entire Spanish newspaper sector. We also find that the best fitting model is the first harmonic of a Fourier series.