Flesch, Fog and Lix readability formulas were used to measure 32 randomly selected chairmen′s address and footnote passages from the annual reports of some Hong Kong public companies for the years 1986 and 1991. Examines four issues: temporal change in readability levels, influence of...

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the presence of variability within the chairman’s address section of the annual report. The coefficiency of variation (V) is used as a simple statistical measure, with calculations based on three Flesch‐based Reading Ease scores from 100‐word...

Annual changes in financial ratio values are susceptible to ambiguous interpretation because of different applications of generally accepted accounting principles and different numerator/denominator component selections. The paper investigates financial ratio disclosure within annual reports,...

The impact of voluntary disclosures on cost of equity capital is of significant interest to investors and managers. Using a disclosure scoring model this association is examined for 135 banks from Europe, North America and Australia. After controlling for the cross-sectional variation in beta,...