It's well known that COVID-19 provided an unanticipated
shock to the economy as a consequence of what economist Paul
Krugman termed the "economic equivalent of a medically induced
coma." As a result, many companies were compelled to disclose
historic performance that was, to put it mildly, at odds with their
expectations of a few months prior, with little insight about the
shape of future performance. In this paper,
The Spread of COVID-19 Disclosure, from the Corporate
Governance Research Initiative at the Stanford Graduate School of
Business and the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford
University, the authors looked at how companies responded to
this situation, examining the levels of transparency that companies
provided in the "widely uncertain" setting of
COVID-19.
