Topic
Annual report
About: Annual report is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4917 publications have been published within this topic receiving 62439 citations. The topic is also known as: Annual report.
Papers published on a yearly basis
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TL;DR: This article examined the relationship between annual report readability and firm performance and earnings persistence and found that firms with lower earnings are harder to read (i.e., they have higher Fog and are longer) and positive earnings of firms with annual reports that are easier to read are more persistent.
Abstract: 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.
1,500 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the relation between annual report readability and firm performance and earnings persistence and found that firms with lower earnings are harder to read (i.e., they have a higher Fog index and are longer).
1,330 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors evaluated the quality and accuracy of environmental disclosure made in corporate annual reports and found that corporate environmental disclosures are incomplete and are not related to the firms' actual environmental performance.
Abstract: This paper evaluates the quality and accuracy of environmental disclosures made in corporate annual reports. Annual report disclosures made by 26 firms in environmentally sensitive industries are examined. An indexing procedure is used to measure the contents of the disclosures, and the relationship between the disclosure contents and the firms' environmental performance is tested. The study provides a detailed measure of environmental disclosure contents. Results indicate that corporate environmental disclosures are incomplete and are not related to the firms' actual environmental performance.
1,068 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors compared the extent of disclosure in the annual reports of Swiss listed companies to possible determinants representing agency and political costs and found that size and internationality play a major role in the disclosure policy of firms.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to relate the extent of disclosure in the annual reports of Swiss listed companies to possible determinants representing agency and political costs. The choice of Switzerland is based on the fact that, prior to the implementation of the new company law on 1 July 1992 Swiss disclosure requirements were very low, so that the major part of the content of the annual report could be considered as voluntarily disclosed. The sample includes the 1991 annual report of 161 industrial and commercial firms. The extent of disclosure is measured by an index based on information whose disclosure is required by the Fourth and Seventh EU Directives. Independent variables are measures of company size, leverage, profitability, ownership structure, internationality, auditor's size, percentage of fixed assets and industry type. Relations are assessed using univariate analyses and multiple regressions. The main result is that size and internationality play a major role in the disclosure policy of firms...
853 citations