I use large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned on financial texts to assess the readabil- ity and neutrality of mutual fund shareholder reports. A neutral tone typically predicts increased fund inflows, but this effect lessens with higher readability. When reports are highly readable, neutrality leads to outflows for outperforming funds and doesn’t boost inflows for underperforming one…
Motivated by firms’ increasing use of new media technology for investor communications, we investigate how alignment between company image and communication platform affects investor judgment and decision making. In our first experiment, we demonstrate that investors expect alignment between firm image and the perception of the new media communication platform managers choose for investor…
Online financial communities provide a unique opportunity to directly examine individual investors’ attention to accounting information on a large scale and in great detail. I analyze accounting-related content in large samples of Yahoo! message board posts and StockTwits and find investors pay attention to a range of accounting information, fixating particularly on earnings, cash, and rev…
This paper examines the influence of financial accounting disclosures (FAD) on the investors’ reactions towards bad news (IRBN), and analytically assesses the moderation effect of the individual investor’s sentiments particularly” Subjective norms” on that relationship in project-based organizations (PBOs) listed in the UAE financial markets from a financial, and psychological persp…
Managers may strategically use discretion over disclosure language to reduce the effect of bad news and/or amplify the effect of good news. We experimentally test how a warning highlighting management’s discretion over disclosure language affects investors’ reactions to more and less readable disclosures. We find that the warning works as intended for good news disclosures, causing them…
As firms increasingly use social media to provide disclosures to investors, it is important to understand whether the characteristics that are associated with these disclosures lead to different reactions from investors than disclosures provided via more traditional channels. In this paper, we use an experiment to examine whether linguistic formality in positive news disclosures, and engage…