How to Talk When a Machine is Listening: Corporate Disclosure in the Age of AI
58 Pages Posted: 14 Sep 2020 Last revised: 15 Jan 2021
Sean Cao
Georgia State University - J. Mack Robinson College of Business
Wei Jiang
Columbia Business School - Finance and Economics; ECGI; NBER
Baozhong Yang
Georgia State University - Robinson College of Business
Alan L. Zhang
Georgia State University - J. Mack Robinson College of Business
There are 2 versions of this paper
How to Talk When a Machine is Listening: Corporate Disclosure in the Age of AI
How to Talk When a Machine is Listening: Corporate Disclosure in the Age of Ai
Date Written: August 31, 2020
Abstract
Growing AI readership, proxied by expected machine downloads, motivates firms to prepare filings that are friendlier to machine parsing and processing. Firms avoid words that are perceived as negative by computational algorithms, as compared to those deemed negative only by dictionaries meant for human readers. The publication of Loughran and McDonald (2011) serves as an instrumental event attributing the difference-in-differences in the measured sentiment to machine readership. High machine-readership firms also exhibit speech emotion assessed as embodying more positivity and excitement by audio processors. This is the first study exploring the feedback effect on corporate disclosure in response to technology.
Keywords: Machine Learning, AI, Corporate Disclosure, Textual Analysis, Speech Analysis, Feedback Effect
JEL Classification: D83, G14, G30
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Sean S. Cao
Georgia State University - J. Mack Robinson College of Business ( email )
P.O. Box 4050
Atlanta, GA 30303-3083
United States
Wei Jiang

Columbia Business School - Finance and Economics ( email )
3022 Broadway
New York, NY 10027
United States
(212) 854-5553 (Phone)
ECGI ( email )
c/o the Royal Academies of Belgium
Rue Ducale 1 Hertogsstraat
1000 Brussels
Belgium
NBER ( email )
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States
Baozhong Yang (Contact Author)
Georgia State University - Robinson College of Business ( email )
35 Broad Street
Atlanta, GA 30303-3083
United States
404-413-7350 (Phone)
404-413-7312 (Fax)
HOME PAGE: https://sites.google.com/view/baozhongyang/
Alan Zhang
Georgia State University - J. Mack Robinson College of Business ( email )
35 Broad Street NW
Suite 1242
Atlanta, GA 30303
United States
HOME PAGE: http://www.alanlzhang.com
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