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

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来说至关重要。叙事性评论是金融传播日益重要的组成部分。虽然英国的财务叙述部分受到现行法规的影响，但高级管理层对这些披露的内容、结构和表达方式享有很大的自由裁量权。财务叙事披露的信息量和管理层运用其报告自由裁量权的方式是学术界和政策制定者面临的关键问题。与负责促进高质量公司治理和财务报告的英国机构——财务报告委员会（FRC）合作，这个跨学科项目将结合会计专业知识和计算语言学的最先进方法，研究财务披露的两个关键要素。第一个方面是初步收益公告（pea），这可以说是英国公司年度报告日历中最重要的披露。第二个方面是对股东的年度报告，这构成了管理层最大的单一经常性披露承诺。关于公司叙事披露存在两种相反的观点。一方面，支持者认为，叙事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表现的偏见。虽然现有的英国年度报告和PEA叙事披露工作提供了与这两种观点一致的证据，但由于结论依赖于应用于小样本的手动编码方法，研究范围和发现的普遍性都受到了损害。该项目将开发和使用最先进的计算机文本分析方法，研究2003年至2016年英国披露的全面样本的财务叙述的属性和有用性。尽管研究人员已经在使用这些方法研究美国公司的信息披露，但获取数字pea和年度报告的问题，加上文件结构不一致，阻碍了对英国财务报告的计算机化分析，并使研究议程偏离了对英国报告结果的研究。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豌豆叙事的大样本分析。该项目还将研究一套与英国年度报告的内容和结构有关的当代政策相关主题。该项目的软件工具和数据集也将为研究界创造新的机会。政策制定者正面临着采取循证方法进行监管的压力。财务汇报局致力于进行影响和评估分析，但它依靠一个相对较小的研究人员团队来承担这些工作，其中大部分涉及人工收集和分析非结构化数据。由于这项工作的劳力密集性质，结果难免难以概括，并限制财务汇报局的工作范围。除了研究新颖和与政策相关的研究问题外，该项目还将在财务汇报局的正式决策过程中嵌入计算机文本分析方法。这些方法将有助于降低成本和更全面地评估叙述性报告中的管制变化和新出现的问题，从而补充现有办法。

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.