Private Voluntary Disclosure, Financial Intermediation and Market Efficiency

This paper describes how 33 large UK companies communicated with their core shareholders, the large UK financial institutions. It focuses on the private voluntary information flows from the investee company to the financial institution (FI) and their eventual release into the public domain. The case is put for the development of a combined theory, which would link, inter alia , private and public disclosure, financial intermediation, informed trading, and market efficiency. This theory development would provide a more coherent framework for understanding the role of financial reports and other public corporate disclosure behaviour in user decisions. It would also play an important role in developing corporate finance theory and its prescriptions for corporate management.