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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether financial companies of the USA are inclined to manipulate the management discussion and analysis (MD&A) tone and thus to follow impression management behaviours. Also, the paper proposes a tone analysis of MD&As conducted by comparing the tone of MD&As of one year with financial conditions of the same year and the next.

The tone analysis is conducted on two sub-samples of US-listed financial companies, unhealthy firms and healthy firms, which experienced different financial conditions between 2002 and 2011.

With regard to healthy firms, MD&A tone is useful to explain the current year’s performance and helps to predict next year performance, whereas, with reference to unhealthy companies, managers use the tone to pursue impression management strategies, by using more positive words and more future-oriented words than healthy companies.

This study analyses the correlation between MD&A tone at time t and financial performance at time t and t+1, it does not investigate other time spans. The empirical results of this study cannot be generalized to other countries.

Main implications are addressed to regulators and policy makers, which may contrast impression management through a more effective regulation. Another implication regards investors, who cannot fully rely on MD&As of unhealthy companies.

This study analyses financial companies, rather neglected by the literature on MD&A tone. Results suggest that financial firms are also inclined to engage in impression management. This research would be useful for investors who base their decisions on qualitative analysis, interested in understanding to what extent the MD&A narratives are reliable.

The purpose of this paper is to give a comprehensive review and synthesis of automated textual analysis of corporate disclosure to show how the accuracy of disclosure tone has been incremented with the evolution of developed automated methods that have been used to calculate tone in prior studies.

This study have conducted the survey on “automated textual analysis of corporate disclosure and its impact” by searching at Google Scholar and Scopus research database after the year 2000 to prepare the list of papers. After classifying the prior literature into a dictionary-based and machine learning-based approach, this study have again sub-classified those papers according to two other dimensions, namely, information sources of disclosure and the impact of tone on the market.

This study found literature on how value relevance of tone is varied with the use of different automated methods and using different information sources. This study also found literature on the impact of such tone on market. These are contributing to help investor’s decision-making and earnings and returns prediction by researchers. The literature survey shows that the research gap lies in the development of methodologies toward the calculation of tone more accurately. This study also mention how different information sources and methodologies can influence the change in disclosure tone for the same firm, which, in turn, may change market performance. The research gap also lies in finding the determinants of disclosure tone with large scale data.

After reviewing some papers based on automated textual analysis of corporate disclosure, this study shows how the accuracy of the result is incrementing according to the evolution of automated methodology. Apart from the methodological research gaps, this study also identify some other research gaps related to determinants (corporate governance, firm-level, macroeconomic factors, etc.) and transparency or credibility of disclosure which could stimulate new research agendas in the areas of automated textual analysis of corporate disclosure.

Voluntary non-financial reporting aims at fairly reporting a firm’s non-financial performance. In particular, integrated reporting (IR) displays in a single report the contribution of different forms of capital to the firm’s value creation. Drawing on both legitimacy and voluntary disclosure theory, the main purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which a company’s environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance affects the content and semantic properties of intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) found in IRs.

To test theoretical hypotheses, content and tone analysis is used to assess the disclosure strategy associated with ICD, whereas a regression analysis tests the variation in semantic properties of ICD according to firms’ ESG performance. A total of 79 reports by European listed firms from 2011 to 2016 were downloaded via the Integrated Reporting Emerging Practice Examples Database and analyzed.

Results show that ESG performance contributing more to optimistic ICD tone is governance, although in mixed ways. Integrating vision and strategy positively contributes to ICD tone, whereas information on poor treatment of shareholders’ rights tends to be manipulated and associated with an optimistic tone of the ICD. Moreover, eco-efficient product innovation and healthy and safe job conditions play a positive role in enhancing optimistic ICD tone.

This chapter contributes to the current literature on voluntary disclosure by introducing new evidence on the disclosure strategy in IR. By analyzing the effect of the single dimensions of ESG performance on ICD tone, this study extends respectively ESG literature.

The integrated reporting framework seeks to connect a firm’s financial and non-financial performance in a single report by displaying how different forms of capital contribute to the firm’s value creation. Drawing on impression management and incremental information approaches, the purpose of this paper is to examine how the content and semantic properties of intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) found in integrated reports is associated with firms’ performance.

All reports by European listed firms from 2011 to 2016 available via the integrated reporting emerging practice examples database are analysed. Content analysis is used to assesses the quality of ICDs, whereas a regression analysis tests the variation in semantic properties of ICDs according to firms’ performance.

ICDs in integrated reports are mainly discursive, with a backward looking orientation and a limited focus on human capital. On average, more than half of each ICD is conveyed in a positive tone. As the optimistic tone in firms’ ICDs increases, so too does their non-financial performance measured in terms of environmental, social and governance aspects. This finding supports the incremental information approach.

This paper contributes to the current literature on ICDs by introducing new evidence on firms’ motivations for non-financial disclosures in integrated reports. By taking a more comprehensive theoretical approach, namely, testing both impression management and incremental information hypotheses, this research extends on prior studies which tested similar relationships in integrated reports but focussed only on the impression management hypothesis.

The authors investigate whether abnormal tone in corporate narrative disclosures is associated with earnings management and earnings quality, in an emerging market context. Based on agency theory and opportunistic/impression management perspective, this study examines whether executives manage disclosure tone to support their opportunistic behavior, when using earnings management.

This study uses a sample of earnings press releases of publicly traded firms in the MENA region during 2014–2019. It employs textual analysis to measure disclosure tone. The authors estimate abnormal disclosure tone after controlling for firm characteristics. Discretionary accruals proxy for earnings management and are estimated using Modified Jones model. Earnings quality is measured using accounting-based and market-based proxies: earnings smoothness, persistence, predictability and value relevance/informativeness.

Results show a positive association between abnormal disclosure tone and earnings management. Additionally, results show that earnings persistence is higher for firms with lower levels of abnormal disclosure tone. Results are sustained for earnings smoothness, but not for predictability and value relevance/informativeness.

Results provide initial evidence of management's use of tone management jointly with earnings management. This adds to prior studies adopting the opportunistic perspective of disclosure tone, through showing that discretionary tone in narrative disclosures can be strategically used by management to influence investors' perceptions.

The results provide valuable insight to board of directors, auditors and market participants on the possible biases emerging from tone of narrative disclosures in corporate reports. For regulators and standard-setters, results shed light on the need for regulations and rules beyond financial statements, to guide disclosure of narrative information in different corporate reports.

This study contributes to the rare evidence that investigates textual disclosure characteristics to uncover management's opportunistic practices and assess earnings quality. Where majority of studies concentrate on developed markets, this study provides novel evidence of emerging markets by examining the association between abnormal disclosure tone and earnings management/earnings quality. Also, it validates the tone management model proposed by Huang et al. (2014) for capturing tone manipulation.

Negative disclosure tone in 10-K annual reports has economic consequences, yet relatively little is known about how it is generated. Boards of directors play an important governance role with respect to mandatory disclosures and personally sign off on Form 10-K, leading us to expect directors to influence financial reporting narratives. This study investigates whether the negative tone of firms' narrative annual report disclosures is associated with the human and social capital of its board of directors.

Multivariate regression analyses of negative disclosure tone (Loughran and McDonald, 2011) on board members' average age, gender, education, financial expertise and turnover is performed. A host of supplemental tests to corroborate our primary analysis, including using Sarbanes-Oxley's financial expert mandate as an exogenous shock to board composition, impact threshold for a confounding variable, placebo analysis, portfolio tests of more and less negative disclosing firms and portfolio tests of “loud” versus “quiet” boards are conducted.

Evidence that directors' gender, education, financial expertise and board turnover are associated with more negative disclosure tone, while directors' age is associated with less negative disclosure tone is found. The study also looked within the board to differentiate whether these findings are driven by characteristics of inside directors or outside directors serving on the audit committee, or both, as these are the specific groups of directors we would expect to play a role in disclosure. It was found that negative disclosure tone is associated with a lower bid-ask spread, so this study interpreted more negative tone as containing more descriptive information.

This study helps decode the “black box” of annual report disclosure tone, which Loughran and McDonald (2011) show has important economic implications. The results help inform stakeholders such as policymakers, executives and capital market participants as to how board member traits are associated with disclosure. The findings are particularly important as this study bears witness to the increasing prominence of gender/diversity mandates (e.g. Israel, Norway, California) and financial expertise mandates (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley).

Prior research shows that managers with lower ability release less accurate management earnings forecasts and have more earnings restatements, lower earnings persistence and lower quality accruals estimations. Yet, whether the impact of managerial ability (MA) on financial reporting can be extended to the narrative section of firms' financial disclosures needs to be theoretically and empirically examined. The authors theorize in this paper that managers with low ability opportunistically inflate the tone to increase outsiders' perceptions of their ability. The authors also examine the relation between MA and the informativeness of tone to predict future firm performance and explain investors' reaction at earnings announcement.

The authors collect 24,000 earnings press releases of 1,149 distinct firms between 2004 and 2013. Content analysis is used to proxy the tone of the disclosures. The authors use the score developed by Demerjian et al. (2012) to measure MA. The authors then employ panel data regressions to examine the impact of MA on disclosure tone.

The authors find that low-ability managers inflate the disclosure tone to positively influence labor market's perceptions about their ability. This effect is magnified for younger and shorter-tenured managers, for firms with more intense monitoring and during bear markets. The authors also find that the tone of earnings press releases of low-ability managers results in a lower stock price reaction. Supplementary analyses show that the results do not only hold for the tone, but also can be extended to other linguistic features such as the numerical intensity and the readability of earnings press releases. The results are robust to alternative library specifications and other corporate disclosures such as CEO letters to shareholders or 10-K filings.

The paper shows that managers worry about how firm performance influences the labor market assessment of their ability. In particular, the authors find that managers of low ability are willing to opportunistically manipulate the content of corporate disclosures to improve this perception and build their reputation.

The authors contribute by providing theoretical and empirical evidence on how managers attempt to steer assessments of their ability by manipulating corporate disclosures. Consistent with prior business research suggesting that one's ability is a key feature that affects managers' propensity to engage in ethical practices, such as tax avoidance or manipulation of financial information, this study shows that less able managers tend to inflate the tone of the earnings announcements and that this ability-driven bias is likely to be magnified by career concerns.

This study aims to focus on automated text analyses (ATAs) of sustainability and integrated reporting as a recent approach in empirical–quantitative research.

Based on legitimacy theory, the author conducts a structured literature review and includes 38 quantitative peer-reviewed empirical (archival) studies on specific determinants and consequences of sustainability and integrated reporting. The paper makes a clear distinction between analyses of reports due to readability, tone, similarity and specific topics. In line with prior studies, it is assumed that more readable reports with less tone and similarity relate to increased reporting quality.

In line with legitimacy theory, there are empirical indications that specific corporate governance variables, other firm characteristics and regulatory issues have a main impact on the quality of sustainability and integrated reporting. Furthermore, increased reporting quality leads to positive market reactions in line with the business case argument.

The author deduces useful recommendations for future research to motivate researchers to include ATA of sustainability and integrated reports. Among others, future research should recognize sustainable and behavioral corporate governance determinants and analyze other stakeholders’ reactions.

As both stakeholders’ demands on sustainability and integrated reporting have increased since the financial crisis of 2008–2009, firms should increase the quality of reporting processes.

This analysis makes major contributions to prior research by including both sustainability and integrated reporting, based on ATA. ATAs play a prominent role in recent empirical research to evaluate possible drivers and consequences of sustainability and integrated reports. ATA may contribute to increased validity of empirical–quantitative research in comparison to classical manual content analyses, especially due to future CSR washing analyses.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate: how dimensions of tone vary across different forms of corporate accountability narrative; the impact of tone on readability; and the determinants of tone, including consideration of its use in impression management.

Using a multi-year sample of listed companies, the authors measure dimensions of tone across multiple narrative types within the annual report and standalone corporate social responsibility report. Statistical analysis is used to investigate variations of tone across narrative type, each dimension’s influence on readability and the role of antecedent factors.

Analysis reveals that dimensions of tone vary significantly across narrative types (genres) suggesting that tonal patterns form part of the specific stylistic conventions of each genre. Tone is found to be a significant determinant of readability. Little evidence of obfuscation using tone was found, while disclosure type is the most salient determinant of tone.

The study illuminates latent or underlying disclosure norms that can facilitate the identification of “exceptional” cases that do not conform with expected tonal patterns of a particular narrative type and may warrant closer inspection by preparers, auditors or regulators. The issues raised regarding the clarity and balance of textual disclosures highlight the challenges in regulating corporate narratives.

This study highlights that tone is a more nuanced and layered concept than suggested by much of the prior literature. Further, tone ought to be considered in studies examining textual complexity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how signals of uncertainty in the media affect retail investor decisions and initial public offering (IPO) underpricing through theoretical and empirical methods.

The authors construct a theoretical model of the influence of media signals on IPO pricing, which describes the micro process in which uncertain signals in media influence retail investors’ decisions and IPO underpricing. Besides, the authors take 516 small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) listed in A-share from July 2009 to December 2012 as samples for empirical tests and establish an in-depth learning model for text analysis with Java programming to measure Chinese media tone. Finally, the results of the model analysis are verified by empirical results.

The results show that authoritative media with high credibility can reduce the uncertainty of information sources attract more investors’ attention and improve the valuation and demand of retail investors. The higher the media credibility is the higher the IPO underpricing rate is. The uncertain tone of the media will increase the decision-making cost of investors reduce the valuation expectation and demand of the secondary market and lead to a lower IPO underpricing rate.

The authors study the influence of the uncertainty of media source and media content on the degree of IPO underpricing of SMEs. This is a useful supplement to the Chinese media tone research system that is still in the exploration stage. The research has reference value for government regulation and investor decision-making.