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The Impact of Information Processing Costs on Firm Disclosure Choice: Evidence from the XBRL Mandate

This paper examines the effect of investor information processing costs on firms’ disclosure choice. Using the recent eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) regulation as an exogenous shock to investors’ processing costs, but not to firms’ disclosure requirements, I find that firms increase their quantitative footnote disclosures after adoption of XBRL detailed tagging requirements designed to reduce investor processing costs. These results hold in a difference-in-difference design using non-adopting firms as the control group. To reinforce my finding that the disclosure increase is prompted by reduced investor processing costs, I examine cross-sectional settings where investor processing costs are likely to vary, showing that the disclosure increase is greater for firms where detailed information is more pertinent than summary measures (those with operations in multiple industries, more volatile earnings, and more disperse analyst forecasts), and smaller for firms with sophisticated investors. These findings suggest that investor processing costs can be significant enough to impact firms’ disclosure decisions.