Thomas Schleicher

Undertaking large-scale disclosure studies when AIMR-FAF ratings are not available: the case of prices leading earnings

Abstract The paper presents a new methodology for evaluating corporate voluntary disclosures in the annual report discussion section. Based on a new dataset of electronic annual reports and a standard text analysis software package, we text-search a large number of annual reports at minimal (marginal) cost. The resulting sample sizes are comparable to those employed in studies based on the AIMR-FAF database. A major advantage of our new scoring system is that it is adaptable to the particular requirements of the research project. We demonstrate the importance of this feature when applying our new disclosure scores to the case of ‘prices leading earnings’. While we are unable to find the predicted association with a broadly defined measure of disclosure quality, our results reverse once we focus on a more narrowly defined metric based on forward-looking profit statements.

Bias in the tone of forward‐looking narratives

Abstract We extend the prior literature on biased disclosure decisions by examining whether, when and how managers bias the tone of forward‐looking narratives. In order to measure tone we employ techniques of manual content analysis and we aggregate positive, neutral and negative statements into an overall measure of tone.We then analyse the frequency of positive and negative statements for firms with large impending year‐on‐year changes in sales and operating profit margin, and we regress tone cross‐sectionally on four managerial incentive variables that are unrelated to the private signal about future trading, namely loss status, sign of earnings change, business risk, and the existence of an analyst earnings forecast. We find that firms with large impending performance declines bias the tone in the outlook section upwards. Also, we find that loss firms, risky firms and firms with an analyst earnings forecast provide a more positive tone, while firms with an earnings decline provide a more negative tone. Finally, we observe that for a majority of our managerial incentive variables the main vehicle of biasing the tone is to change the number of negative statements, not the number of positive statements. Overall, our findings are difficult to reconcile with predictions from signalling models, but they are consistent with the alternative view of impression management. Our results have policy implications. In particular, they suggest that there is a need to reconsider the current largely unregulated nature of forward‐looking narratives.

Share price anticipation of earnings and management's discussion of operations and financing

Abstract This paper combines research on the measurement of disclosure quality and the measurement of share price anticipation of earnings to produce a new test of the usefulness of the information disclosed in management discussions of operations and financing for predicting future earnings. Market-Based Accounting Research has shown that earnings changes are anticipated and impounded in prices well before the financial year for which earnings are reported. This price anticipation leads to downward biased earnings response coefficients (ERCs) in the commonly estimated regression model of returns on contemporaneous earnings changes. We exploit predictable differences in the biasedness of the ERC estimate across firm-years to test the hypothesis that share prices are better informed when the annual report contains a detailed discussion of the firms operations and financing. Our results suggest that such voluntary disclosure may have been useful in predicting future earnings changes. The effect would appea...

When is good news really good news

The impression management literature suggests that managers often resort to biased disclosures. However, there is little systematic evidence on what types of strategies management uses to achieve this bias. Do managers simply lie? Or, do they use more subtle ways of introducing positive bias into corporate narratives, such as selecting specific information items which result in a more positive impression (‘selectivity’) or by keeping their narratives vague and general (‘vagueness’)? In order to differentiate between the two scenarios, I re-examine the positive forward-looking statements examined by Schleicher and Walker (2010) and compare, across firms with improving and deteriorating financial performance, the managerial choices made in relation to eight forecast attributes. I make two observations. First, there are significant differences in the characteristics of good- and bad-news firms’ positive statements. In particular, bad-news firms’ positive statements involve more non-specific time horizons, more segmental forecasts, and more references to conditions and aims and objectives, but fewer directional forecasts, fewer numbers, and fewer reinforcing qualifiers. Second, the identified differences in good- and bad-news firms’ positive statements can be exploited for classification purposes: including into a classification model additional regressors that measure a positive forward-looking statements level of selectivity and vagueness significantly increases the models ability to separate firms with improving financial performance from firms with deteriorating financial performance. Overall, my results are consistent with (a) impression management operating predominantly through selectivity and vagueness and (b) selectivity and vagueness being an important signal for future financial performance.

A time-series analysis of the scale of coercive journal self-citation and its effect on impact factors and journal rankings

ABSTRACT The growing institutional significance of impact factors and journal rankings currently stands alongside serious concerns about the scale and distorting effects of the practice of coercive journal self-citation. Survey-based studies have highlighted journals suspected of such coercion but there has been very little empirical analysis of actual citation practice and the respective impact on journal quality rankings. This paper collects information on actual self-citation trends over the period 2000–2012 for all business and management journals indexed in Journal Citation Reports and finds evidence of sudden and sharp increases in self-citation relative to outside citation. This paper also finds that two leading hybrid journal ranking systems, the UK’s 2010 Association of Business Schools (ABS) and the 2013 Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) rankings, do not discriminate between legitimate and coercive self-citation. Collectively, these findings have implications regarding the institutional reliance placed on citation counts as quantitative measures of accountability. However, the deterrent potential of our analysis, especially given the ease with which coercive self-citation behavior can be empirically detected from publicly available data, could provide an important limit on the spread of performativity.

Are interim management statements redundant

In 2004 the Transparency Directive increased the reporting frequency by mandating the Interim Management Statement (IMS). However, only nine years later, the EU announced that it was making quarterly reporting voluntary again, arguing that IMSs are redundant as they are unlikely to contain any additional information not already required by the Market Abuse Directive (MAD). The current paper tests this argument empirically. For that it collects data on trading statements from a post-MAD pre-IMS year and uses these statements to predict which IMSs are genuinely incremental firm announcements (‘incremental IMSs’) and not simply substitutes for otherwise disclosed trading statements (‘non-incremental IMSs’). It then calculates three-day abnormal return variability and abnormal trading volume associated with incremental and non-incremental IMSs and it makes three observations. First, the introduction of IMSs coincided with a substantial reduction in other trading statements consistent with a large substitution effect between IMSs and non-periodic trading statements. Second, incremental third-quarter IMSs, but not incremental first-quarter IMSs, exhibit significantly positive abnormal return variability and abnormal trading volume, suggesting that the withdrawal of IMSs will involve the loss of some relevant information. Third, higher abnormal return variability and trading volume for non-incremental IMSs, relative to incremental IMSs, are consistent with the argument that a MAD-only regime will ensure the release of most relevant information.