The Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy

Lack of transparency is at the heart of today’s financial crisis, and also complicates global trade.  In the U.S., information disclosure represents the newest wave of regulatory approaches in a variety of sectors, including the environment, workplace safety, food safety, and finance. 

This is an opportune moment to take stock of what is known about the costs and benefits of information disclosure, what we are learning in today’s cutting-edge research, and where are the remaining gaps in our understanding.  This two-part workshop will connect the worlds of practice, policy and scholarship, identifying cross-cutting issues and opportunities that arise in a variety of sectors.

Agenda

9:00 am Welcome – John Mayo, Georgetown
9:05 am Opening keynote speaker – David Weil, Boston University

9:30 am Panel 1: Information Disclosure Regulations

To what extent are information disclosure regulations delivering their intended results?
How are customers, investors, and other stakeholders responding to the disclosed information?
Chair: Michael Toffel, Harvard
• Jay Shimshack, Tulane U.
• Andres Vinelli, Chief Economist, Office of Research and Analysis, Public Company Accounting Oversight Board

10:15 am Panel 2: Voluntary disclosure

What information do firms voluntarily choose to disclose?
Under what circumstances do they disclose?
Chair: Thomas Lyon, U. Michigan
• Zoe Riddell, Vice President, The Carbon Disclosure Project
• Nilmini Rubin, Professional Staff Member, Senate Foreign Relations Committee

11:00 am Coffee Break

11:15 am Panel 3: Disclosure Credibility and Certification

To what extent is corporate information disclosure credible?
Are mechanisms such as third-party verification enhancing its credibility?
Chair: John Mayo
• John Maxwell, U. Western Ontario
• Lori Bird, Senior Analyst, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
• Barbara Kipp, Partner, Risk Advisory Services, PricewaterhouseCoopers

12:00 pm Lunch and Discussion: What else do we need to know about disclosure?

Chair: Andrew King, Dartmouth/Harvard
• Mark Cohen, Vice President for Research and Senior Fellow, Resources for the Future
• Pauline Ippolito, Acting Director of the Bureau of Economics, Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

1:15 pm Break

1:30 pm Research methods discussion

Chair: Mike Lenox, U. Virginia
• Andrew Daughety, Vanderbilt University: Modeling for non-modelers
• Yue Li, U. Toronto: Empiricism for non-empiricists
• Ronald R. King, Washington University, Experimentalism for non-experimentalists

The following paper sessions examine three federal government disclosure policies.

2:30 pm Paper Session 1: Strategic voluntary disclosure

• Tom Lyon (U. Michigan) and Eun-Hee Kim (U. Michigan) “Greenhouse Gas Reductions or Greenwash?: The DOE's 1605b Program”

3:00 pm Paper Session 2: Information disclosure regulations

• Hyunhoe Bae (Syracuse), Peter Wilcoxen (Syracuse), David Popp (Syracuse) “Information Disclosure Policy: Do States' Data Processing Efforts Help More than the Information Disclosure Itself?”

3:30 pm Paper Session 3: Voluntary disclosure and the regulator

• Michael Toffel (Harvard) and Jodi Short (Georgetown) “Coming Clean and Cleaning Up: Is Voluntary Disclosure a Signal of Effective Self-Policing?”

4:00 pm Closing remarks – John Mayo, Mike Toffel, Tom Lyon

4:15 pm Workshop ends  RSVP here

PDF of the Agenda is available here.
Hotel Information is available here.

Travel funding for participants provided through the support of the Erb Institute.

For more information please contact Andrea Salvatore.

 
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