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The Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy

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Schedule for Information Disclosure Conference (2/6/09) Announced

Date: December 22, 2008

Corporate Transparency and Accountability:
The Role of Information Disclosure Friday,
February 6, 2009

The National Press Club
529 14th Street, NW, Washington, DC


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

A printable, PDF version of the schedule is available here.

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