Information Decay and Financial Disclosures

Using data from the SEC’s EDGAR server log, we examine the consumption of financial information  in filings  from  2003  through  2012.  We document  how quickly download counts for EDGAR forms decay over the year following their initial filing. We find that different types of disclosures experience very different information flows as measured by download activity. After examining a variety of the  most  common  forms,  we  focus  on  annual  reports  (10-K)  and  registration statements  (S-1).  The  magnitude  of  the  daily  EDGAR  requests  for  10-Ks  is relatively low and shows a surprisingly small difference between firms with and without publicly-traded equity.

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