审计师会关注文本信息披露吗?——来自管理层讨论与分析文本相似度的证据

Do Auditors Pay Attention to the Disclosure of Text Information:Evidence from Text Similarity in MD&A

以文本形式披露的非财务信息在资本市场中发挥着日益重要的作用,并为大量投资者所使用,但是其传递的信息含量较难量化。本文通过对比管理层讨论与分析中＂未来发展展望＂段与上一期披露内容的相似度,探究这一变化是否会影响以及如何影响审计费用。研究发现,文本相似度越低,审计费用越高,说明审计师对这种非财务信息给予了额外的关注,从而增加了审计成本,导致审计费用的提高。进一步研究发现,对成长性越高、盈余管理动机越强的公司而言,＂展望＂段的增量信息所增加的审计费用越多;此外,本文还发现管理层讨论与分析中关于过去的＂回顾＂段也会带来审计费用的增加,但是审计师更加关注＂展望＂段的信息。

Non-financial information disclosure in textual form plays an increasingly important role in the capital market which is used by a large number of investors,but its information content is difficult to be quantified. By comparing the similarity between the paragraph of ＂future outlook＂in MDA and the one in previous period,this paper explores whether this change will affect and how it will affect audit fee. The study found that the lower text similarity,the higher audit fees,which showed that auditors react to the non-financial information thus increasing the audit cost and lead to increasing the audit fee. Further research found that for companies with higher growth and stronger motivation of earnings management,the incremental information in the ＂future outlook＂paragraph increased the audit cost. In addition,the effect of this incremental information on audit costs is more obvious in non-state-owned enterprises and those with short listed time. Meanwhile this paper also found that the ＂review＂section in MDA also leads to an increase in audit fee,but auditors pay more attention to the information of ＂future outlook＂paragraph.