Investigating Abnormal Disclosure Tone in Corporate Narratives: Evidence from an Emerging Market

Abstract

Investigating Abnormal Disclosure Tone in CorporateNarratives: Evidence from an Emerging Market 1. Introduction Firms usually communicate their information to external interested parties and different stakeholders through a variety of channels, such as annual reports, corporate social responsibility (CSR) or sustainability reports, investors' presentations, conference calls, press releases, websites etc. (Brennan and Merkl-Davies, 2018). For years, corporate reports were mainly composed of large amounts of numerical or quantitative information, with small portions of explanations and descriptions (except for footnotes with the financial statements). Since quantitative information provide users with an incomplete picture of the company's economic performance (Huang et al., 2014), there is a need to be accompanied by unstructured textual information. Nowadays, narrative or qualitative disclosures have become a very important form of disclosures, representing a major part of firms' reports (Lo et al., 2017;Masztalerz, 2016).As a result, researchers' attention was directed towards examining different characteristics and dimensions of narrative disclosures, such as length (e.g.