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Did SOX Improve the Quality of Information?

A new paper says no:

Public, private and total information quality is examined. Our information quality measures are based on financial analyst forecasts as in Barron, Kim, Lim and Stevens (1998) and Gu (2005). We find that the passage of SOX is associated with a temporary increase in the quality of public information immediately following the Act’s adoption, but the increase is not maintained. By one year after the introduction of SOX, private, public and total information quality all decline and continue to stay below their pre-SOX levels. While the reforms introduced with the passage of SOX may have helped to improve the reliability of corporate financial disclosures, the increase in reliability appears to have come at the cost of less information being made available.