Using debit and credit card transaction-level data, we find that a one standard deviation increase in firms’ reported earnings surprise is linked to a 2.4% or $460 increase in quarterly consumption of the people residing near the disclosing firms’ headquarters. This positive link is more pronounced when earnings news (i) is more informative about local households’ prospective wealth, (ii) has greater dissemination through media, and (iii) is subject to more information acquisition by locals. Consumption responds to earnings disclosures across various local stakeholders, including employees, small business owners, and investors, and is concentrated in less expensive goods, such as dining out, and in counties where firms undertake significant investment and spending. We further show local household consumption responds positively even to fraudulent earnings, but this positive link reverses after the fraud is revealed. A nationwide survey of 500 households supports our archival findings. Specifically, households believe that important financial news about local area companies can significantly impact their spending decisions via its effect on local investments or job opportunities. Collectively, our findings suggest corporate disclosures play an important, but underexplored, informational role in shaping the spending of local households.

We examine how information disclosures from private firms affect analysts’ public firm earnings forecasts. On the one hand, private firm disclosures allow analysts to better understand industry-wide business conditions, enabling them to forecast peer public firms’ earnings more accurately. On the other hand, increased disclosure by private firms crowds out capital supply to public peers, increasing the latter’s business uncertainty and reducing analyst incentives to follow them, thus leading to reduced forecast accuracy. Employing a comprehensive international sample of public firms over the period 2000-2019, we find that analysts’ public firm forecast accuracy is positively related to the amount of information disclosed by peer private firms. This relation is explained by financial-statement footnote information rather than balance-sheet or income-statement items and is driven by disclosures from large private firms. The relation is stronger for forecasts issued for larger public firms, in industries where public firms are economically more linked to private peers, and in industries with a greater presence of private firms. Further, the observed relation is stronger when analysts have more incentives to issue accurate forecasts. Evidence from a plausibly exogenous shock to private firm disclosures further confirms this relation and suggests that the improvement in public firm forecast accuracy is due to increased private firms’ disclosures, rather than due to changes in public firms’ own disclosure behavior.

We quantify the impact of peer competition effects in influencers’ sponsored content creation on social media platforms. Using detailed data on a leading social media platform in China, we document that influencers’ sponsored content creation decisions are significantly influenced by peer influencers, but such peer effects only affects the quantity of the sponsored content but not the quality of sponsored content. We further identify that such peer effects are primarily driven by the “defensive effect” of top influencers against smaller influencers and the “competition motive” between smaller influencers, but not driven by the “social learning motive” that smaller influencers follow top influencers or the “competition motive” between top influencers. Finally, we show that such peer effects drive influencers to purchase more in-feed advertising service from the platform, and lower their asking price of sponsored content, but do not lead to increased creative effort of the sponsored content.