Over the past decade, corporate scandals have proliferated. These scandals along with the emergence of the #MeToo movement and Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) mandates, have increased the scrutiny of corporations’ ethics culture. How have companies responded in terms of...

Do investors quickly and rationally react to the content of oil-related news articles revealing supply and demand information? Our paper creates a novel keyword list of 130 oil-related words and modifiers that enable investors/researchers to measure the information content of oil stories. We...

Defining and measuring readability in the context of financial disclosures becomes important with the increasing use of textual analysis and the SEC's plain English initiative. We propose defining readability as the effective communication of valuation relevant information. The Fog Index — the...

Form S-1 is the first SEC filing in the initial public offering (IPO) process. The tone of the S-1, in terms of its definitiveness in characterizing the firm's business strategy and operations, should affect investors' ability to value the IPO. We find that IPOs with high levels of uncertain...

Investors are often concerned that managers might hide negative information in filings. With advances in textual analysis and widespread document availability, individuals can now easily search for phrases that might be red flags indicating questionable behavior. We examine the impact of 13...

Textual analysis, implemented at scale, has become an important addition to the methodological toolbox of finance. In this paper, given the proliferation of papers now using this method, we first provide an updated review of the literature while focusing on a few broad topics—social media,...

Public companies in the United States are required to file annual reports (Form 10-K) that, among other things, disclose the risk factors that might negatively affect the price of their stock. The risk of a pandemic was well known before the current crisis and we now know the impact for...

Using data from the SEC's EDGAR server log, we examine the consumption of financial information in filings from 2003 through 2012. The EDGAR filings represent a first-source database for investors doing fundamental research on stock valuations. The magnitude of daily EDGAR requests for 10-Ks is...