We introduce and apply machine transfer learning methods to analyze accounting disclosures. We use the examples of the new BERT language model and sentiment analysis of quarterly earnings disclosures to demonstrate the key transfer learning concepts of: (i) pre-training on generic “Big...

I study the MD&A section of 10-K filings and use disclosed numbers within the text of corporate narratives to proxy for the qualities of information that are demanded by long-term investors. I hypothesize and show that the prevalence of quantitative information in firms' written communication is...

Numbers are central to financial and accounting disclosures, yet current textual analysis research generally ignores numbers within disclosures. We hypothesize and show that the prevalence of numbers within a corporate disclosure is highly correlated with the readability of the disclosure. More...

This study examines whether mandatory adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) leads to capital market benefits through enhanced financial statement comparability. UK domestic standards are considered very similar to IFRS (Bae et al. 2008), suggesting any capital market...

Prior research provides evidence that managers delay the reporting of goodwill impairments. This study builds on this evidence by investigating whether managers use their private information regarding goodwill impairments to profit from trading in their own firms' shares. We find evidence of...

This paper examines how the reporting model for a firm's operating assets affects analyst forecast accuracy. We contrast UK and US investment property firms having real estate as their primary operating asset, exploiting that UK (US) firms report these assets at fair value (historical cost). We...

This paper investigates the effect of fair value reporting and its attributes on audit fees. We use as our primary sample the European real estate industry around mandatory IFRS adoption (under which reporting of property fair values becomes compulsory), due to its unique operating and reporting...

This paper investigates alternative models of learning to explain changes in uncertainty surrounding earnings innovations. As a proxy for investor uncertainty, we use model-free implied volatilities; as a proxy for earnings innovations, representing signals of firm performance likely to drive...

This paper investigates whether managers' presentation of special items within the financial statements reflects economic performance or opportunism. Specifically, we assess special items presented as a separate line item on the income statement (income statement presentation) to those...

Finance theory proposes that firms' cost of capital increases when market makers set wider spreads due to perceived higher information asymmetry across traders. Using a sample of UK investment property firms and controlling for firms' non-random selection of external monitors, we find evidence...