Annual Report Readability Research Articles

Tax Aggressiveness, Accounting Fraud, and Annual Report Readability

Purpose: There are some proofs provided by previous research that when a management wants to hide something (i.e: earning management), the firm’s annual report becomes less readable. This research would like to reaffirm such notion by examining the impact accounting fraud and tax aggressiveness of a firm on its annual report readability. Methodology: This study uses data from companies listed in Indonesia Stock Exchange in 2016. To prove that tax aggressiveness and accounting fraud do reduce annual report readability, this study uses multiple regression that is run by SPSS 22 software. Finding: From the output of multiple regression analysis, it is proven that tax aggressiveness has a negative relation with annual report readability. Tax aggressiveness is a “grey area” action that could be considered as illegal activity altogether. That being said, the more aggressive a firm’s tax planning is, the more management has to hide to avoid the possibility of being questioned or even punished by financial authorities. With so much to hide, the annual report becomes more complex and thus, increase the Fog Index number. Accounting fraud however, has no significant impact on annual report readability. There are two reasons why this hypothesis cannot be proven. First, out 558 companies listed in Indonesia Stock Exchange, there are only 37 companies that restated their financial reports in 2016 so restatement’s effect on annual report readability cannot be defined clearly. Second, there are many reasons why management restates their financial report and not all of them are bad. Some restatements are done purely because of unintentional error. In this paper there is no measure that could determine management’s intention therefore, the increase Fog Index reading could happen with or without restatement. Originality: This is the first study that researches the relation between tax aggressiveness, accounting fraud, and annual report readability.

The influence of business strategy on annual report readability

Concerns about the complexity of firm disclosures have prompted regulators to initiate projects to improve the readability of annual reports. We investigate business strategy as a determinant of annual report readability. As business strategy fundamentally determines a firm’s product and market domain, technology, and organizational structure, it influences a firm’s operating complexity, environmental uncertainty and information asymmetry. Consequently, business strategy frames the level, wording, and complexity of disclosures. We capture a firm’s business strategy based on the Miles and Snow (1978) strategic typology and measure 10-K readability with Li’s (2008) Fog index. We find that firms pursuing an innovation-oriented prospector strategy have less readable 10-Ks relative to firms pursuing an efficiency-oriented defender strategy. We also find that prospectors display more negative and uncertainty tones while defenders exhibit more litigious tone in their 10-Ks. Our study provides useful insights to policy makers as it suggests that efforts to improve annual report readability may be limited for some firms given that business strategy is a fundamental determinant of readability and pronouncements accommodating different strategic orientations are not feasible.

Annual Report Readability, Firm Performance, and Earnings Management

Annual Report Readability, Firm Performance, and Earnings Management

Reporting strategies: What makes family firms beat around the bush? Family-related antecedents of annual report readability

We investigate the heterogeneity of reporting strategies across family firms by focusing on the readability of annual reports. Adopting the socioemotional wealth perspective, we introduce three family-related antecedents of annual report readability to accounting and family business literature: family power, the overlap between family and firm name, and generational stage. Our findings, based on the textual analysis of 288 annual reports of Italian listed family firms, reveal that annual report readability increases at higher levels of family power, decreases at later generational stages, and when the firm carries the family name.

Short Selling and Readability in Financial Disclosures: A Controlled Experiment

We examine the causal effect of short-selling on a firm’s annual report readability using Regulation SHO, which relaxes short-sale constraints for a random sample of pilot stocks. Pilot firms’ annual report readability decreases during the experiment period. This short-selling effect on 10-K readability is more pronounced for firms that receive less investor attention and for firms with worse news. Pilot firms also increase the use of uncertainty words in 10-Ks during the experiment period. Our results suggest that firms produce less transparent 10-Ks that are more costly for investors to comprehend when short-sale constraints are less rigorous.

Credit default swap spreads and annual report readability

We examine the relationship between CDS spreads and annual report readability in this paper. Our results suggest that annual report readability is negatively related to CDS spreads. Furthermore, on the information supply side, the effect of readability on CDS spreads is more concentrated on firms with high analyst coverage. On the information demand side, the impact of readability on CDS spreads is more concentrated on firms with high information asymmetry. Results are robust to endogeneity issues and different subsamples. Our results suggest that investors appear to take into account the information transparency in their view of the firms’ default risk.

Annual Report Readability, Tone Ambiguity, and the Cost of Borrowing

This paper investigates the impact of a firm’s annual report readability and ambiguous tone on its borrowing costs. We find that firms with larger 10-K file sizes and a higher proportion of uncertain and weak modal words in 10-Ks have stricter loan contract terms and greater future stock price crash risk. Our results suggest that the readability and tone ambiguity of a firm’s financial disclosures are related to managerial information hoarding. Shareholders of firms with less readable and more ambiguous annual reports not only suffer from less transparent information disclosure but also bear the increased cost of external financing.

Earnings management and annual report readability

We explore how the readability of annual reports varies with earnings management. Using the Fog Index to measure readability (Li, 2008), and focusing on the management discussion and analysis section of the annual report (MD&A), we predict and find that firms most likely to have managed earnings to beat the prior year's earnings have MD&As that are more complex. This disruption of the overall pattern of readability increasing with the level of earnings found in Li (2008) challenges the ontological explanation that good news is inherently easier to communicate, and shows that obfuscation contributes to making disclosures more complex.

Guiding through the Fog: Does annual report readability reveal earnings management?

This paper attempts to find a relationship between earnings management and annual report readability. The study was conducted on the French stock market between 2010 and 2013 and includes 163 firms listed on the CACALL shares index. We assess the readability of annual reports using the Gunning-Fog Index and earnings management is measured by discretionary accruals estimated using the models of Dechow et al. (1995) and Raman and Shahrur (2008). Our results show the existence of a positive and significant relation between the level of discretionary accounting adjustments and Fog Index. In fact, companies managing their earnings tend to make annual report readability more complex. In this way, we also find a significant link between the Fog Index and the other financial indicators of our model (Ownership dispersion, Profitability, Leverage and Firm size), so supporting our main result.

Financial Report Readability, Crash Risk and the Cost of Borrowing

This paper investigates the impact of a firm’s annual report readability and ambiguous tone on its borrowing costs. We find that firms with larger 10-K file sizes and a higher proportion of uncertain and weak modal words in 10-Ks have stricter loan contract terms and greater future stock price crash risk. Our results suggest that readability and tone ambiguity of a firm’s financial disclosures are related to managerial information hoarding. Shareholders of firms with less readable and more ambiguous annual reports not only suffer from less transparent information disclosure but also bear the increased cost of external financing.

Credit Default Swap Spreads and Annual Report Readability

We examine the relationship between CDS spreads and annual report readability in this paper. Our results suggest that annual report readability is negatively related to CDS spreads. Furthermore, on the information supply side, the effect of readability on CDS spreads is more concentrated on firms with high analyst coverage. On the information demand side, the impact of readability on CDS spreads is more concentrated on firms with high information asymmetry. Results are robust to endogeneity issues and different subsamples. Our results suggest that investors appear to take into account the information transparency in their view of the firms’ default risk.

Accounting Statement Footnotes Contextual Association with Firm Financial Characteristics in the Oil and Gas Industry

Information quality of financial accounting statements is an issue for readers’ decision-making. This study investigates the association of the annual report readability with the firm’s weighted average cost of capital (a key ratio used in firm valuations and investments). The study focuses upon the oil and gas industry in order to include an analysis of “successful efforts” versus “full cost” accounting methods. Prior studies find that as the level of useful information increases in the financial statements, the corresponding firm’s information asymmetries decrease, resulting in a company’s lower cost of capital (Francis, J. et al. 2008, and Barth M. et al. 2013). The current study findings indicate that the accounting readability of annual reports does associate with weighted average cost of capital. This study extends readability research into this financial ratio footnote and MD&A area. The study also finds the accounting choice of “successful efforts” versus “full cost” affects readability of annual report information, but no association is apparent of the method with the weighted average cost of capital.

The Effect of Annual Report Readability on Cost of Debt

This study examines whether and how borrowing firms’ financial statement readability affects the contracting features of syndicated loans. Using a sample of loans issued by U.S. public firms in the syndicated loan market over the period 1994-2007, we find strong evidence that firms producing more difficult-to-read annual reports incur higher cost of debt proxied by private loan yield spread. Our results are consistent with the view that annual report readability reduces information processing costs to creditors. In addition, the association between readability and cost of borrowing is more pronounced for firms with weak governance and firms with low relationship intensity.

Financial Opacity and Firm Performance: The Readability of REIT Annual Reports

We examine the capital market pricing implications of firm disclosure opacity as measured by the linguistic readability of REIT annual reports. The SEC has expressed concern that firms selectively manage the transparency of disclosures in order to hide adverse information. After controlling for other non-experimental factors that influence the readability of REIT financial statements, we find (1) financial opacity is negatively related to reported firm performance, and (2) the residual opacity that remains after controlling for other determinants of annual report readability has incremental explanatory power for returns beyond the Fama and French (1992, 1993) risk factors. The opacity risk-return premium persists after controlling for a (heretofore undocumented) stark monotonic decrease in annual report readability following the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

The Effect of Annual Report Readability on Analyst Following and the Properties of Their Earnings Forecasts

ABSTRACT: This study examines the effect of the readability of firms’ written communication on the behavior of sell-side financial analysts. Using a measure of the readability of corporate 10-K filings, we document that analyst following, the amount of effort incurred to generate their reports, and the informativeness of their reports are greater for firms with less readable 10-Ks. Additionally, we find that less readable 10-Ks are associated with greater dispersion, lower accuracy, and greater overall uncertainty in analyst earnings forecasts. Overall, our results are consistent with the prediction of an increasing demand for analyst services for firms with less readable communication and a greater collective effort by analysts for firms with less readable disclosures. Our results contribute to the understanding of the role of analysts as information intermediaries for investors and the effect of the complexity of written financial communication on the usefulness of this information.

Discussion of “Annual report readability, current earnings, and earnings persistence”

Li [2008. Annual report readability, current earnings, and earnings persistence. Journal of Accounting and Economics, this issue, doi:10.1016/j.jacceco.2008.02.003] finds that firms with losses, or with transient income, write annual reports with long sentences and big words. I begin by discussing some explanations for Li's primary results, using his more detailed results, along with the results of related papers, to assess the plausibility of those explanations. I then briefly discuss the 10-K's of a single company over the course of 3 years, to provide more detailed insight into what might drive the length and readability of annual reports. Finally, I present some possible directions for future research.

Annual report readability, current earnings, and earnings persistence

This paper examines the relation between annual report readability and firm performance and earnings persistence. I measure the readability of public company annual reports using the Fog index from the computational linguistics literature and the length of the document. I find that: (1) the annual reports of firms with lower earnings are harder to read (i.e., they have a higher Fog index and are longer); and (2) firms with annual reports that are easier to read have more persistent positive earnings.

Risk reporting by the largest UK companies: readability and lack of obfuscation

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine risk disclosures by UK companies within their annual reports. Tests are performed to measure the level of the readability of the risk disclosures and to assess whether directors are deliberately obscuring bad risk news.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws upon methodologies developed in prior empirical studies of annual report readability. Thus it uses the Flesch Reading Ease formula to measure the readability of the risk disclosures and coefficients of variation are used to measure obfuscation. A content analysis approach is adopted to identify risk disclosures.FindingsThe paper finds that the mean Flesch reading ease ratings for the sample companies are all below 50 indicating that the level of readability of the risk disclosures is difficult or very difficult and this supports prior research examining the readability of sample passages in annual reports. No evidence is found to suggest that directors are deliberately obfuscating or concealing bad risk news through their writing style.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper also finds that the Flesch reading ease ratings measure the readability, not the understandability, of disclosures and whilst actions can be taken to minimise problems associated with reliability when performing content analysis they cannot be wholly eliminated.Practical implicationsThe paper shows that there have been calls for improved risk disclosures to enable stakeholders to better understand a company's risk position. Requiring directors to issue extra risk information will not, however, lead to enhanced risk communication unless the readability of the risk disclosures is also improved.Originality/valueIn this paper it is shown that there have been no prior studies that focus upon testing for readability and obfuscation in risk disclosures. It is important that transparent risk information is provided to the marketplace and therefore this study is valuable in its examination of the clarity of communication of published risk information.

Annual Report Readability, Current Earnings, and Earnings Persistence

This paper examines the relationship between annual report readability and firm performance and earnings persistence. This is motivated by the Securities and Exchange Commission's plain English disclosure regulations that attempt to make corporate disclosures easier to read for ordinary investors. I measure the readability of public company annual reports using both the Fog Index from computational linguistics and the length of the document. I find that the annual reports of firms with lower earnings are harder to read (i.e., they have higher Fog and are longer). Moreover, the positive earnings of firms with annual reports that are easier to read are more persistent. This suggests that managers may be opportunistically choosing the readability of annual reports to hide adverse information from investors.

The effect of thematic structure on the variability of annual report readability

The readability of annual reports has been the focus of extensive prior research. However, the extent of readability variability has only recently received specific attention. In response to a perceived need for further research into this area, an analysis of 60 UK chairman’s statements was conducted in order to test for possible determinants of readability variability. Results show the introduction to the chairman’s statement is systematically easier to read than other parts of the chairman’s statement. No evidence was found to support prior research that, rather than present accounting narratives objectively, managers use readability variability to emphasise good news and obfuscate bad news. The thematic structures within the chairman’s statement were investigated to explore whether they were responsible for systematic patterns in the variability of annual report readability. Findings indicate that thematic structure of the chairman’s statement is indeed a key driver of the variability of annual report readability.