Securities regulators require that registrants make certain disclosures to promote fair and efficient markets and protect investors. The benefits of such disclosure requirements to investors and market participants should outweigh their regulatory burden. The US Securities & Exchange Commission, in 2011, adopted rules that require mining registrants to disclose, in their periodic reports, information regarding specified health and safety violations, orders and citations, related assessments and legal actions, and mining-related fatalities. To the best of our knowledge, no prior work in the literature has examined the usefulness of mandatory safety disclosures to investors. This work uses a case study of one mining registrant to examine whether investors respond to periodic mine safety disclosures. We accomplish this by comparing the stock price of the mining firm to that of a peer at the time of the mine safety disclosures to see if there are "abnormal" returns. Our preliminary results suggest that there is no significant difference in the returns due to mine safety disclosures. Further research with a larger set of disclosure events is necessary to confirm this result.
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