IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/1612.09244.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Measuring the temperature and diversity of the U.S. regulatory ecosystem

Author

Listed:
  • Michael J Bommarito II
  • Daniel Martin Katz

Abstract

Over the last 23 years, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has required over 34,000 companies to file over 165,000 annual reports. These reports, the so-called "Form 10-Ks," contain a characterization of a company's financial performance and its risks, including the regulatory environment in which a company operates. In this paper, we analyze over 4.5 million references to U.S. Federal Acts and Agencies contained within these reports to build a mean-field measurement of temperature and diversity in this regulatory ecosystem, where companies are organisms inhabiting the regulatory environment. While individuals across the political, economic, and academic world frequently refer to trends in this regulatory ecosystem, far less attention has been paid to supporting such claims with large-scale, longitudinal data. In this paper, we document an increase in the regulatory energy per filing, i.e., a warming "temperature." We also find that the diversity of the regulatory ecosystem has been increasing over the past two decades, as measured by the dimensionality of the regulatory space and distance between the "regulatory bitstrings" of companies. These findings support the claim that regulatory activity and complexity are increasing, and this measurement framework contributes an important step towards improving academic and policy discussions around legal complexity and regulation.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael J Bommarito II & Daniel Martin Katz, 2016. "Measuring the temperature and diversity of the U.S. regulatory ecosystem," Papers 1612.09244, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2017.
  • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1612.09244
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.09244
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bommarito, Michael J. & Katz, Daniel M., 2010. "A mathematical approach to the study of the United States Code," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 389(19), pages 4195-4200.
    2. Clark, Tom S. & Lauderdale, Benjamin E., 2012. "The Genealogy of Law," Political Analysis, Cambridge University Press, vol. 20(3), pages 329-350, July.
    3. Karen K. Nelson & A. C. Pritchard, 2016. "Carrot or Stick? The Shift from Voluntary to Mandatory Disclosure of Risk Factors," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 13(2), pages 266-297, June.
    4. Blakeley B. McShane & Oliver P. Watson & Tom Baker & Sean J. Griffith, 2012. "Predicting Securities Fraud Settlements and Amounts: A Hierarchical Bayesian Model of Federal Securities Class Action Lawsuits," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 9(3), pages 482-510, September.
    5. Feng Li, 2010. "The Information Content of Forward‐Looking Statements in Corporate Filings—A Naïve Bayesian Machine Learning Approach," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 48(5), pages 1049-1102, December.
    6. Yang Bao & Anindya Datta, 2014. "Simultaneously Discovering and Quantifying Risk Types from Textual Risk Disclosures," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 60(6), pages 1371-1391, June.
    7. Tsai, Ming-Feng & Wang, Chuan-Ju, 2017. "On the risk prediction and analysis of soft information in finance reports," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 257(1), pages 243-250.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Everett, Jeff & Shiraz Rahaman, Abu & Neu, Dean & Saxton, Gregory, 2024. "Letters to the editor, institutional experimentation, and the public accounting professional," CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, Elsevier, vol. 99(C).
    2. Gao, Lei & Calderon, Thomas G. & Tang, Fengchun, 2020. "Public companies' cybersecurity risk disclosures," International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, Elsevier, vol. 38(C).
    3. Allen H. Huang & Jianghua Shen & Amy Y. Zang, 2022. "The unintended benefit of the risk factor mandate of 2005," Review of Accounting Studies, Springer, vol. 27(4), pages 1319-1355, December.
    4. Özgür Arslan‐Ayaydin & James Thewissen & Wouter Torsin, 2021. "Disclosure tone management and labor unions," Journal of Business Finance & Accounting, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 48(1-2), pages 102-147, January.
    5. James P. Ryans, 2021. "Textual classification of SEC comment letters," Review of Accounting Studies, Springer, vol. 26(1), pages 37-80, March.
    6. Borchert, Philipp & Coussement, Kristof & De Weerdt, Jochen & De Caigny, Arno, 2024. "Industry-sensitive language modeling for business," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 315(2), pages 691-702.
    7. Moumen, Néjia & Ben Othman, Hakim & Hussainey, Khaled, 2015. "The value relevance of risk disclosure in annual reports: Evidence from MENA emerging markets," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 34(C), pages 177-204.
    8. Huijue Kelly Duan & Hanxin Hu & Yangin (Ben) Yoon & Miklos Vasarhelyi, 2022. "Increasing the utility of performance audit reports: Using textual analytics tools to improve government reporting," Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 29(4), pages 201-218, October.
    9. Ingrid E. Fisher & Margaret R. Garnsey & Mark E. Hughes, 2016. "Natural Language Processing in Accounting, Auditing and Finance: A Synthesis of the Literature with a Roadmap for Future Research," Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 23(3), pages 157-214, July.
    10. Hassanein, Ahmed, 2022. "Risk reporting and stock return in the UK: Does market competition Matter?," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 59(C).
    11. Matteo Cinelli & Valerio Ficcadenti & Jessica Riccioni, 2020. "The interconnectedness of the economic content in the speeches of the US Presidents," Papers 2002.07880, arXiv.org.
    12. Agarwal, Arvind & Gupta, Aparna & Kumar, Arun & Tamilselvam, Srikanth G., 2019. "Learning risk culture of banks using news analytics," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 277(2), pages 770-783.
    13. Christina Bannier & Thomas Pauls & Andreas Walter, 2019. "Content analysis of business communication: introducing a German dictionary," Journal of Business Economics, Springer, vol. 89(1), pages 79-123, February.
    14. Frankel, Richard & Jennings, Jared & Lee, Joshua, 2016. "Using unstructured and qualitative disclosures to explain accruals," Journal of Accounting and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 62(2), pages 209-227.
    15. Matteo Cinelli & Valerio Ficcadenti & Jessica Riccioni, 2021. "The interconnectedness of the economic content in the speeches of the US Presidents," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 299(1), pages 593-615, April.
    16. Sabri Boubaker & Dimitrios Gounopoulos & Hatem Rjiba, 2019. "Annual report readability and stock liquidity," Financial Markets, Institutions & Instruments, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 28(2), pages 159-186, May.
    17. Kim, Hyonok & Yasuda, Yukihiro, 2018. "Business risk disclosure and firm risk: Evidence from Japan," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 413-426.
    18. Li, Hui & Zeng, Min & Liu, Ya-Fei, 2023. "Secret sentiments make for good announcements: Does unjustified managerial belief benefit tourism firm performance?," Annals of Tourism Research, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    19. Wang, Chao & Zhang, Yue & Zhang, Weiguo & Gong, Xue, 2021. "Textual sentiment of comments and collapse of P2P platforms: Evidence from China's P2P market," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 58(C).
    20. Acheampong, Albert & Elshandidy, Tamer, 2021. "Does soft information determine credit risk? Text-based evidence from European banks," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 75(C).

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1612.09244. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.