This paper examines the hypothesis that audited financial reporting and voluntary disclosure of managers’ private
information are complementary mechanisms for communicating with investors, not substitutes. We test the hypothesis in
Ball (2001) that independent verification and reporting of financial outcomes encourages managers to be more truthful
and hence more precise in their disclosures. This allows managers to credibly disclose private information that is not
directly verifiable, alleviating the problem (Crawford and Sobel, 1982) that private information disclosure as a stand-alone
mechanism is uninformative because in equilibrium it is untruthful.