Corporate Disclosures in Pandemic Times. The Annual and Interim Reports Case

The paper examines if COVID-19 crisis has brought changes in companies’ approach on corporate reporting, with focus on annual reports. The research method is based on text mining techniques in order to build measures of readability and tone of uncertainty of annual reports, given the information published by the companies listed on four stock exchanges from Europe, namely the Bucharest Stock Exchange, ATHEX Stock Exchange, IBEX-35, and WIG-20 between 2017–2020. Findings emphasize, through text mining, multivariate analysis, and topic modeling, that the analyzed reports are less extensive in times of pandemic and tend to become more generic. Among firms’ financial performance metrics considered in our models, we found that there is a significant association only between annual reports textual characteristics and respectively, firm size, price earnings ratio and accruals reported. We prove as well significant stock exchange effects and industry effects. Our results show a slight decrease in annual reports readability, while the tone of uncertainty is more prominent within firms listed on less mature stock exchanges.