From 2013 to 2015, China gradually established nationwide air quality monitoring stations and began to release real-time air pollution information to the public. We exploit step-by-step environmental regulations across cities to identify the effects of information disclosure on air pollution. We find that information disclosure significantly decreases the concentrations of PM2.5 and PM10. Through mechanism analysis, we find that information disclosure raises the level of government awareness, increases the amount of investments in air pollution prevention and control, stimulates green innovation, and forces heavily polluting enterprises to shut down. Additionally, we find evidence that the effectiveness of information disclosure varies across cities.

Partial equilibrium models have been used extensively by policy makers to prospectively determine the consequences of government programs that affect consumer incomes or the prices consumers pay. However, these models have not previously been used to analyze government programs that inform consumers. In this paper, we develop a model that policy makers can use to quantitatively predict how consumers will respond to risk communications that contain new health information. The model combines Bayesian learning with the utility-maximization of consumer choice. We discuss how this model can be used to evaluate information policies; we then test the model by simulating the impacts of the North Dakota Folic Acid Educational Campaign as a validation exercise.

The vaginal mesh scandal, in which thousands of women were irreversibly maimed by polypropylene mesh, revealed multilevel failures in medical device regulation and implantation, demonstrating that patient-centric care has not yet fully transcended from policy into practice. In law, informed consent is considered by a two-stage test: reasonable treatment and patient information disclosure. The standard of reasonable treatment is determined according to what is deemed acceptable in accordance with a body of medical opinion. However, such bodies of medical opinion were vulnerable to external influence from device manufactures. Vaginal mesh manufacturers were found to have had financial links to research, royal colleges, and influential clinicians, which then influenced the basis of the evidence-based practice that often guides such bodies of medical opinion. According to the Independent Medicines and Medical Device Safety Report, patients’ mesh complications were also frequently under-reported and patient-based evidence of harm disregarded. Patients were also not sufficiently informed of the material risks or reasonable alternatives to mesh, which is required of the second stage of informed consent pertaining to information disclosure. This paper makes the following recommendations: that conflict of interest disclosure be mandated, that greater value be afforded to patient-based evidence to improve evaluation of treatments, and that information disclosure for informed consent should relate to the risks, benefits, and alternatives to the surgical procedure and medical device. This will ensure that patients can evaluate whether surgeons are offering unbiased treatment options and are also informed of the potential long-term risks associated with device implantation.

This paper investigates whether exposure to explanatory diagrams can affect a major financial decision. In a controlled experiment, participants were given Pension Benefit Statements with or without one or two diagrams, before answering incentivised questions that measured recall, comprehension and choice of contribution rate. The diagrams had at best a marginal influence on recall or comprehension. Nevertheless, a diagram relating contributions to income projections prompted more participants to advocate higher contributions, while both diagrams influenced the rationale participants gave for decisions. The implication is that although pension products remain hard to understand, diagrams may alter decisions by reinforcing relevant causal thinking.

Significant efforts towards environmental transparency have been made by the Chinese government since 2008. This paper focuses on the technical decisions shaping a database of official pollution information built and operated by a Chinese NGO known as the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE). Issues of standardization, power distribution and institutional fragmentation are discussed. The paper illustrates a case of NGOs integrating enforcement capabilities as data centres amidst the growing reliance on processes of informational governance of environmental issues.

Government mandates to disclose information are a standard response to problems of asymmetric information. We examine recent major U.S. regulations issued between 2008 and 2013 to identify disclosure mandates and look for quantitative assessments of their effectiveness in improving comprehension. We also reviewed the retrospective regulatory review reports of four federal agencies – prepared pursuant to Executive Orders 13563 and 13579 – for analyses of existing mandates. We find that although mandated disclosures underpin a number of major federal regulatory initiatives, agencies infrequently issue such mandates based on scientifically valid, controlled studies of the improvements in comprehension from such disclosure. We also conduct four case studies drawn from the relatively few instances where federal agencies have evaluated improvements in comprehension, to identify current best practices. Finally, we recommend reforms to improve federally mandated information disclosure.

This study incorporates insights from both institutional and family socioemotional wealth perspectives with agency theory to examine the relationships among governance practices, family ownership, and information disclosure quality. Employing a sample of 516 publicly listed firms in Taiwan over a period of 5 years (2006–2010), we found that high levels of board independence and board activity have a significant positive effect on disclosure quality. Further, family ownership positively moderated the relationship between board independence and disclosure quality. This relationship is stronger with a higher level of family ownership. The results support the institutional proposition that family-owned firms that pursue socioemotional wealth are more likely to promote information transparency to gain legitimacy and enhance their reputations with outside stakeholders.

‘Nanotechnology’, the manipulation of matter on an atomic and molecular scale, is projected to profoundly alter manufacturing systems globally. However, along with the promise that these new technologies hold, there are concerns about the possibility of unknown latent risks to human health or the environment. Under current scientific uncertainties, regulators explore new strategies for overseeing the development and safe use of nanotechnologies. Information disclosure plays a prominent role among these strategies. Thus far, however, the informational strategies actually employed by governments have focused on means by which to collect information from industry, and the types of information requested do not allow for an adequate health risk assessment. Moreover, little effort has been made to make the information collected publicly available. The article addresses the question of what information is disclosed (or not disclosed) and why, highlighting the socio-political context within which these decisions are made, and their democratic implications. It argues that the current ‘light-touch’ disclosure-based approach may lie in technical, evidence-based, ‘risk’ conception, which is common to both the United States and the European Union. It further argues for a more democratic ‘governance-by-disclosure’ approach, which allows society to prioritize risks that it is willing to take to enjoy the benefit of technological progress.