上市公司年报文本增量信息与违规风险预测——基于语调和可读性的视角

Listed Companies’ Annual Report Incremental Text Information and Fraud Risk Prediction:From the Perspective of Tone and Readability

本文基于2006-2019年我国沪深A股上市公司年度财务报告的文本数据,探讨并检验了年报文本语调和可读性特征与公司违规风险之间的经济关联,主要有三点发现:第一,随着年报文本负面语调指标的提升,可读性指标的降低,公司违规概率和违规的严重程度显著增大;第二,机制检验结果表明,年报语调和可读性指标能够传递公司财务困境以及经营风险的增量信息,进而有助于识别公司潜在的违规风险;第三,当企业信息透明度较低、盈利能力较差时,负面的文本特征指标可以视为对业绩指标的补充验证,揭示出公司面临更大的违规动机。同样,在企业年报可读性较差时,负面的语调指标与之形成了信息强化效应,两类文本指标的交互验证能够更为有效地识别公司的违规动机。上述结论表明,上市公司年报文本数据能够为监管部门创新监管方式,提高监管效率,防范化解风险提供新的思路和方法。

Based on the text information abstracted from the annual financial reports of Chinese A-Share listed companies from 2006 to 2019, this paper examines the economic relationship between the tone and readability of the annual report and corporate fraud risk. The three main findings are as follows:first, with the increase of the negative tone and decrease of the readability of annual financial report, the probability and severity of corporate fraud increase significantly. Second, the mechanism test illustrates that tone and readability indicators convey incremental information of firm’s financial distress and operational risk, and then help identify the corporate potential fraud risk. Third, when the firm’s information transparency is low and profitability is poor, the negative tone can be supplementary verification of performance indicators, revealing that the firm faces greater fraud motivation. Similarly, when the readability indicator is low, the negative tone indicator shows information reinforcement effect. The interactive verification of two textual indicators can effectively identify the potential motivation of corporate fraud. The above results show that textual data abstracted from annual reports of listed companies could serve as an innovative tool for regulators to improve supervision efficiency, forestall and defuse major risks.