World Transparency Survey Project

Thomas Rauter, Assistant Professor of Accounting, IBM Corporation Faculty Scholar & Asness Junior Faculty Fellow

I am working on an international survey on corporate transparency practices using an innovative survey tool and in-depth phone interviews with accounting and finance managers to collect highly granular transparency data for firms across 10+ developed and developing countries. The goal is to measure previously unquantified aspects of corporate transparency for the first time in a systematic fashion on a large scale. So far, the corporate finance, banking, and accounting literatures have almost exclusively focused on revealed preference measures of what firms disclose to outsiders. However, the “production function” of corporate transparency remains largely unobserved. This project will allow us to open the black box of how firms produce transparency, which will be of relevance to several bodies of literature at the intersection of finance, economics, and accounting.