财务报告文本相似度与违规处罚——基于文本分析的经验证据

Financial Report Textual Similarity and the Likelihood of Regulatory Penalties ——Based on the Empirical Evidence of Textual Analysis

本文以2008—2016年我国A股非金融类上市公司为研究样本,运用文本分析法考察上市公司财务报告相似度对违规处罚概率的影响。研究发现,"管理层讨论与分析"(以下简称MD&A)与上一期相比相似度越高,上市公司当期因违规行为被监管机构处罚的概率越高;非"管理层讨论与分析"(以下简称非MD&A)与上一期相比相似度越高,上市公司当期被监管机构处罚的概率越低。监管机构更关注MD&A部分的信息含量,对非MD&A部分更关注其披露内容的稳定性和合规性。进一步分析发现,国有产权性质削弱了MD&A文本相似度与违规处罚的正向关系,文本可读性好加强了非MD&A文本相似度与违规处罚的负向关系。最后,分别考察MD&A"回顾"和"展望"、非MD&A"公司治理"和"会计政策"相关文本的相似度与违规处罚的关系,本文的研究结论依然成立。本文的研究结论从文本分析的视角丰富了上市公司违规处罚影响因素的研究,亦为政府监管机构完善监管处罚和信息披露政策提供了有力依据,具有重要的理论和现实意义。

This paper uses A-share non-financial listed companies on the Chinese stock market from 2008 to 2016 as a sample and investigates the influence of financial reports’ similarity on the likelihood of being punished.The empirical result shows that the higher similarity to the last MD&A,the higher probability of being punished for fraud firms;the higher similarity to the last Non-MD&A,the lower probability of being punished for fraud firms.Namely,regulatory enforcement pays more attention to the information content of MD&A and the stability and conformity of Non-MD&A respectively.Further analysis shows that state property right can mitigate the positive relationship between MD&A similarity and the probability of being punished,better textual readability can aggravate the negative relationship between Non-MD&A similarity and the probability of being punished.Finally,after considering the review and preview part of MD&A,the corporate governance and accounting policy part of Non-MD&A respectively,the conclusions still stand.This paper enriches the research of determinants of penalties for fraud firms from the perspective of textual analysis and provides empirical evidence for governments to promote policies about regulatory penalty and information disclosure,which has important theoretical and practical meanings.