Analysing Narrative Aspects of UK Preliminary Earnings Announcements and Annual Reports: Tools and Insights for Researchers and Regulators

分析英国初步收益公告和年度报告的叙述方面：研究人员和监管机构的工具和见解

• 批准号: ES/R003904/1
• 负责人: Steven Young
• 金额: $ 54.08万
• 依托单位: Lancaster University
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2017 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=ES%2FR003904%2F1
• 关键词: Analysing; Narrative; Aspects; UK; Preliminary

The quality of information provided to investors by corporate management in publicly traded companies is a matter of central importance to financial market participants. Narrative commentaries represent an increasingly significant component of financial communications. While financial narratives in the UK are shaped in part by prevailing regulations, senior management enjoys significant discretion over the content, structure and presentation of these disclosures. The informativeness of financial narrative disclosures and the way management apply their reporting discretion are key questions for academics and policymakers. Partnering with the UK body responsible for promoting high quality corporate governance and financial reporting - the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) - this interdisciplinary project will combine expertise from accounting with state-of-the-art methods from computational linguistics to examine two key elements of financial disclosure. The first aspect is preliminary earnings announcements (PEAs), which arguably represent the most important disclosure in UK firms' annual reporting calendar. The second aspect is the annual report to shareholders, which forms the largest single recurring disclosure commitment for management.Two opposing perspectives exist on corporate narrative disclosures. On the one hand, proponents argue that narratives provide information beyond that contained in financial data. On the other hand, opponents claim that management exploit the discretion embedded in narrative reporting to obfuscate or present a biased representation of actual performance. While extant work on UK annual report and PEA narrative disclosures provides evidence consistent with both perspectives, both the scope of the research and the generalizeability of findings is compromised because conclusions rely on manual coding methods applied to small samples.This project will develop and use state-of-the-art computerized textual analysis methods to study the properties and usefulness of financial narratives for a comprehensive sample of UK disclosures published between 2003 and 2016. While researchers are already using these methods to study disclosures made by US companies, problems accessing digital PEAs and annual reports coupled with inconsistent document structure has hindered computerized analysis of UK financial narratives and skewed research agendas away from studying UK reporting outcomes. This project will shine much needed light on two key aspects of UK narrative reporting. The work will provide the first large sample analysis of PEAs narratives. The project will also examine a set of contemporary policy-relevant themes relating to the content and structure of UK annual reports. Software tools and datasets from the project will also create new opportunities for the research community.Policymakers are facing pressure to adopt evidenced-based approaches to regulation. While the FRC is committed to conducting impact and evaluation analyses, it is reliant on a relatively small team of research staff to undertake such work, much of which involves manual collection and analysis of unstructured data. The labour-intensive nature of the work inevitably yields results that are hard to generalize and constrains the scope of the FRC's work. As well as examining novel and policy-relevant research questions, this project will embed computerized text analytics methods in the FRC's formal policymaking processes. The methods will complement existing approaches by facilitating lower cost and more comprehensive assessments of regulatory changes and emerging issues in narrative reporting.

上市公司管理层向投资者提供的信息质量对金融市场参与者至关重要。叙述性评论是金融传播中越来越重要的组成部分。虽然英国的财务叙述部分受现行法规的影响，但高级管理层对这些披露的内容、结构和列报方式享有很大的酌情权。财务叙述性披露的信息量以及管理层如何运用其报告裁量权是学术界和决策者的关键问题。这一跨学科项目与负责促进高质量公司治理和财务报告的英国机构-财务报告理事会合作，将联合收割机的会计专业知识与计算语言学的最先进方法结合起来，审查财务披露的两个关键要素。第一个方面是初步收益公告，这可以说是英国公司年度报告日历中最重要的披露。第二个方面是提交给股东的年度报告，这是管理层最大的一项经常性披露承诺。一方面，支持者认为，叙述提供的信息超出了财务数据所包含的信息。另一方面，反对者声称，管理层利用叙述性报告中的自由裁量权来混淆或呈现对实际业绩的有偏见的陈述。虽然关于英国年度报告和PEA叙述性披露的现有工作提供了与这两种观点一致的证据，研究的范围和结论的普遍性都受到了影响，因为结论依赖于应用于小样本的手动编码方法。该项目将开发和使用最先进的艺术的计算机文本分析方法，以研究的性质和有用的财务叙述的全面样本，英国披露之间公布的2003年和2016年。虽然研究人员已经使用这些方法来研究美国公司的披露，但访问数字PEA和年度报告的问题以及不一致的文件结构阻碍了对英国财务叙述的计算机分析，并使研究议程偏离了研究英国报告结果。这个项目将照亮英国叙事报道的两个关键方面。这项工作将提供第一个大样本分析PEAs叙述。该项目还将审查与联合王国年度报告的内容和结构有关的一系列当代政策相关主题。该项目的软件工具和数据集也将为研究界创造新的机会。政策制定者正面临采用基于证据的监管方法的压力。虽然财汇局致力于进行影响和评估分析，但它依赖于一个相对较小的研究人员团队来开展此类工作，其中大部分涉及人工收集和分析非结构化数据。这项工作的劳动密集性质不可避免地会产生难以概括的结果，并限制了财务汇报委员会的工作范围。除了研究新的和与政策相关的研究问题外，该项目还将在FRC的正式决策过程中嵌入计算机文本分析方法。这些方法将有助于对叙述性报告中的监管变化和新出现的问题进行更低成本和更全面的评估，从而补充现有的方法。

项目成果

Modern Slavery Reporting Practices in the UK

英国现代奴隶制报告实践

• 发表时间: 2022
• 作者: Steven Young

Do corporate press releases drive media coverage?

企业新闻稿是否会推动媒体报道？

• DOI: 10.1016/j.bar.2020.100881
• 发表时间: 2020
• 期刊: The British Accounting Review
• 作者: Tsileponis N

Capital market response to high quality annual reporting: evidence from UK annual report awards

资本市场对高质量年度报告的反应：来自英国年度报告奖项的证据

• DOI: 10.1080/00014788.2022.2106542
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: Accounting and Business Research
• 影响因子: 1.7
• 作者: Chircop J

Retrieving, classifying and analysing narrative commentary in unstructured (glossy) annual reports published as PDF files

检索、分类和分析以 PDF 文件形式发布的非结构化（光面）年度报告中的叙述性评论

• DOI: 10.1080/00014788.2019.1609346
• 发表时间: 2019
• 期刊: Accounting and Business Research
• 影响因子: 1.7
• 作者: El-Haj M

Fad or future? Automated analysis of financial text and its implications for corporate reporting

时尚还是未来？

• DOI: 10.1080/00014788.2019.1611730
• 发表时间: 2019
• 期刊: Accounting and Business Research
• 影响因子: 1.7
• 作者: Lewis C