In this paper, we examine how the emergence of voluntary disclosure standards can alter the nature of information available to capital market participants. Using industry-specific dictionaries of sustainability terms contained in voluntary disclosure standards developed by the Sustainability...

In this paper, we examine factors prompting companies to voluntarily adopt sustainability standards for sustainability reporting and the consequences of such voluntary commitment. Using data on firms’ voluntary adoption of sustainability standards developed by the Sustainability Accounting...

We construct an index of aggregate management optimism from managers' qualitative disclosures in annual and quarterly financial reports and show that this index varies with market-wide sentiment. First, we find that the correlation between the management optimism index and Baker and Wurgler's...

Using the propensity to engage in extra-marital activities as a proxy for sensation seeking behavior, we show that sensation-seeking households exhibit riskier economic behavior. They are more likely to obtain a home loan and, conditional upon borrowing, they choose larger loans. Banks are at...

Street earnings are non-GAAP earnings, adjusted for consistency with the analyst majority basis and disseminated by forecast data providers (FDPs). We find that the time it takes an FDP to incorporate street earnings in its products (activation delay, hereafter) reflects variation in the...

The prominence of textual data in accounting research has increased dramatically. To assist researchers in understanding and using textual data, this monograph defines and describes common measures of textual data and then demonstrates the collection and processing of textual data using the...

In this paper, we develop techniques that combine text with financial variables to generate explicit firm-level forecasts. We find that text-enhanced models are more accurate than models using quantitative financial variables alone, providing evidence on the predictive value of the MD&A section....

Natural language is a key form of communication in the capital markets. Textual analysis is the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to textual data for automated information extraction or measurement. We survey publications in top accounting journals and describe the trend and...