While disclosure advocates embrace this episode as the comeuppance of a company that had something to hide, I think a different lesson might be drawn. Target’s political spending was almost certainly, on balance, in line with the interests of the corporation. You can’t pick and choose the positions of your candidate, and Target was contributing to MN Forward, not the candidate directly. But by using information obtained as a result of a disclosure law, activists were able to manufacture a problem for Target that disrupted its operations.

Other sorts of disclosure, like the Securities and Exchange Commission-mandated financial reporting by publicly traded companies, can alter the incentives of corporate managers in counterproductive ways. In a working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research in September, the researchers Alex Edmans, Mirko Heinle and Chong Huang used a theoretical model to show that mandated disclosure leads corporate managers to prefer decisions that produce favorable, verifiable information — like taking steps to increase short-term profits — over actions that may be better for the company in the long run but do not produce easily measurable data, like creating an environment that fosters innovation.

You might suspect that the benefits of disclosure far exceed any such costs. But my colleague Saumya Prabhat and I have found empirical evidence to the contrary. In recently conducted research, we studied the consequences of a 2000 law in Britain that required greater disclosure — and even shareholder approval — of corporate political spending. Because some disclosure was required before 2000, we were able to obtain data on which companies were politically active and which were not. Using a statistical method to isolate the effect of the law, we looked at the three years before the law went into effect and the three years afterward, to see how politically active and inactive companies changed.

We found that after the law went into effect, politically active businesses in Britain did not see changes in stock price volatility (a common measure of financial risk) that differed from those of their politically inactive counterparts. Any benefits to shareholders provided by the law were counterbalanced by its costs.

But, you might be thinking, who cares about shareholders? It’s democracy that we should be worried about. Political scientists often argue that the citizenry benefits if it knows, for example, about corporate spending on ballot measures on which it is preparing to vote. (If you are critical of oil companies, and an oil company spends money in favor of an initiative, that may be all you need to know to cast a “no” vote.)