The Trade-Off between Mandatory and Voluntary Disclosure: Evidence from Oil Companies’ Risk Reporting

Abstract

Theoretical propositions suggest that mandatory and voluntary disclosures are related. Empirical studies focusing on this relationship provide mixed evidence as they found that mandatory and voluntary disclosure are either complements or substitutes. Relying on a proprietary, hand-collected database about the risk disclosure of oil companies, we find that voluntary risk disclosure increases with the level of mandatory risk disclosure up to a threshold above which companies reduce their voluntary disclosures. We also find that this relationship depends on the firm-level uncertainty, and it is sharpened in presence of high exposure to liquidity risk. Overall, our results contribute to the debate on whether and on which level disclosure should be regulated.