The evolution of 10-K textual disclosure: Evidence from Latent Dirichlet Allocation

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dyer, Travis; Lang, Mark; Stice-Lawrence, Lorien
• 署名单位: University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Chapel Hill; University of Southern California
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ACCOUNTING & ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0165-4101
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jacceco.2017.07.002
• 发表日期: 2017
• 关键词: topic model; earnings; READABILITY

摘要

We document marked trends in 10-K disclosure over the period 1996-2013, with increases in length, boilerplate, stickiness, and redundancy and decreases in specificity, readability, and the relative amount of hard information. We use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to examine specific topics and find that new FASB and SEC requirements explain most of the increase in length and that 3 of the 150 topics fair value, internal controls, and risk factor disclosures account for virtually all of the increase. These three disclosures also play a major role in explaining the trends in the remaining textual characteristics. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.