Measuring Readability in Financial Disclosures
44 Pages Posted: 1 Sep 2011 Last revised: 16 Jul 2013
Date Written: July 16, 2013
Abstract
Defining and measuring readability in the context of financial disclosures becomes important with the increasing use of textual analysis and the SEC’s plain English initiative. We propose defining readability as the effective communication of valuation relevant information. The Fog Index — the most commonly applied readability measure — is shown to be poorly specified in financial applications. Of Fog’s two components, one is misspecified and the other is difficult to measure. We report that 10-K document file size provides a simple readability proxy that outperforms the Fog Index, does not require document parsing, facilitates replication, and is correlated with alternative readability constructs.
Keywords: Readability, Fog Index, textual analysis
JEL Classification: G14, G18, M41
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
Giving Content to Investor Sentiment: The Role of Media in the Stock Market
-
More than Words: Quantifying Language to Measure Firms' Fundamentals
By Paul C. Tetlock, Maytal Saar-tsechansky, ...
-
Is All that Talk Just Noise? The Information Content of Internet Stock Message Boards
By Murray Z. Frank and Werner Antweiler
-
Media Coverage and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns
By Lily H. Fang and Joel Peress
-
When is a Liability not a Liability? Textual Analysis, Dictionaries, and 10-Ks
By Tim Loughran and Bill Mcdonald
-
Do Stock Market Investors Understand the Risk Sentiment of Corporate Annual Reports?
By Feng Li
-
Yahoo! For Amazon: Sentiment Parsing from Small Talk on the Web
By Sanjiv Ranjan Das and Mike Y. Chen
-
By Zhi Da, Joseph Engelberg, ...
-
By Joshua D. Coval and Tyler Shumway
-
The Impact of Credibility on the Pricing of Managerial Textual Content
By Elizabeth Demers and Clara Vega