Short Selling Pressure,Stock Price Behavior,and Management Forecast Precision: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Using a natural experiment (Regulation SHO), we show that short selling pressure and consequent stock price behavior have a causal effect on managers’ voluntary disclosure choices. Specifically, we find that managers respond to a positive exogenous shock to short selling pressure and price sensitivity to bad news by reducing the precision of bad news forecasts. This finding on management forecasts appears to be generalizable to other corporate disclosures. In particular, we find that, in response to increased short selling pressure, managers also reduce the readability (or increase the fuzziness) of bad news annual reports. Overall, our results suggest that maintaining the current level of stock prices is an important consideration in managers’ strategic disclosure decisions.     

我国保险条款可读性分析及其通俗化研究

我国保险条款晦涩难懂的问题已经在很大程度上制约了我国保险业的健康发展,本文详细剖析了我国保险条款在文字、内容、形式等方面存在的问题,并从我国实际情况出发,指出了当前我国进行保险条款通俗化的迫切性,提出了我国保险条款通俗化的思路构想.     

谈党报指导性与可读性的结合

党报指导性与可读性结合不仅是内涵深广的理论问题 ,而且是迫切需要解决的实际问题。党报的性质和任务决定了报纸在具有可读性的同时要增强指导性 ,指导性要寓可读性之中。从新闻工作的客观规律出发 ,把二者结合起来 ,既能使报道能够吸引群众 ,又有助于提高全民族思想道德水准和科学文化修养。     

CEO power and annual report reading difficulty

We examine the impact of CEO power on reading difficulty of corporate annual reports. We find that CEO power is positively related to reading difficulty, implying that annual reports of corporations with powerful CEOs are difficult to read and understand. More importantly, we find that the relation between CEO power and reading difficulty is moderated by earnings performance or corporate governance. Additional findings suggest that this relation becomes stronger for firms with lower financial reporting quality or for CEOs with shorter tenure. Our study not only joins the debate on the consequences of powerful CEOs but also uncovers several factors that moderate the relation between CEO power and annual report reading difficulty.     

Annual report readability and corporate agency costs

Annual reports are the main sources of information for outside investors’ investment decisions and enable shareholders to supervise the management. Difficulties with the readability of these reports may therefore have serious consequences. Using 19,221 firm-year observations of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2001 to 2015, we investigate the association between annual report readability and corporate agency costs, where readability is proxied by report file length and/or file size. We find that firms with better annual report readability experience lower agency costs, and the negative association between readability and agency costs is more pronounced in firms with higher external audit quality, internal control quality or analyst coverage. These results hold after several robustness checks. The positive effect of annual report readability is stronger in private firms than in state-owned enterprises, and becomes stronger after the implementation of new accounting standards in 2007. Readable annual reports can help in monitoring corporate insiders’ opportunistic behavior and thus reduce agency costs.     

Understanding investors’ reliance on disclosures of nonfinancial information and mitigating mechanisms for underreliance

This study uses two experiments to examine whether nonprofessional investors rely on voluntarily disclosed nonfinancial information (NFI) and the factors that affect their reliance on such information. Results from experiment one suggest that nonfinancial disclosure affects high-experience (long-term) investors more than low-experience (short-term) investors. In addition, more investing experience seems to compensate the insensitivity to NFI caused by a short-term investment horizon. Results from experiment two suggest that merely requiring participants to evaluate firms’ performance separately based on the financial and nonfinancial measures (NFMs) – or merely presenting the NFMs in a more readable format – does not significantly alter the reliance on the nonfinancial disclosure for low-experience and short-term investors. However, when the two interventions are implemented simultaneously, NFI significantly affects the amount invested by those investors.     

国家预算中存在的问题及对策初探

国家预算是政府基本的财政收支计划,是政府配置社会资源的重要方式,也是调控社会经济运行的重要手段.科学的国家预算是国家稳定发展的基本条件.提高国家预算水平,必须加强公开性、可读性、合理性、法律性等.     

高职任务驱动教材开发研究

本文旨在研究高职任务驱动型教材的具体模式,及教材内容的可读性和教材的可用性。对目前市面上任务驱动教材编写模式进行改进,研究出更适合现代高职学生特点的教材。     

Ease of reading of mandatory information on Canadian food product labels

Food product labels present individual product information, safety, nutrition, electronic inventory, container and environmental information, in various formats, languages and images. Some information is mandatory; much is promotional. The food label is an essential tool for regulators of safe food handling, nutrition policy and fair competition. Mandatory information on food labels in Canada is required to be presented in both English and French, readily discernable, prominently displayed and legible. This study examines the ease of finding and reading of mandatory label components on selected Canadian food products. A validated typographical scoring system assessed the lists of ingredients on a purposive sample of 100 food labels representing foods in all groups in Canada's Food Guide. Seven percent of the ingredient lists were easy to read; 26% were difficult to read and 67% were very difficult to read. Well‐educated resourceful readers in consumer focus groups examined food labels for key elements that influence ease of finding and reading information. Focus groups and typographical scoring identified: colour contrast, case, print style, print size, space between the lines, reverse print, organization, justification, type of surface, hyphenation and print reproduction as factors that affect ease of reading. Print that curves around a container, lack of paragraphing or point form organization make reading difficult; text blocks at right angles to each other make comparisons difficult; separation of the nutrition facts table from the list of ingredients makes decision making tedious. Inadequate spacing between lines of print creates problems for readers of English and exacerbates problems for readers of French. Words placed over illustrations, busy backgrounds or watermarks increase reading difficulty. Hazard statements, instructions and storage information imbedded in other information without added space or appropriate heading is difficult to find and read. Canadian consumers echo consumers in 28 European countries who find label information difficult to find and to read and want clear guidelines/regulations on the placement and the typography of mandatory food label components