Search

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate corporate financial disclosure via Twitter among the top listed 350 companies in the UK as well as identify the determinants of the extent of social media usage to disclose financial information. Design/methodology/approach: This study applies an unsupervised machine learning technique, namely, Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling to identify financial disclosure tweets. Panel, Logistic and Generalized Linear Model Regressions are also run to identify the determinants of financial disclosure on Twitter focusing mainly on board characteristics. Findings: Topic modeling results reveal that companies mainly tweet about 12 topics, including financial disclosure, which has a probability of occurrence of about 7 percent. Several board characteristics are found to be associated with the extent of Twitter usage as a financial disclosure platform, among which are board independence, gender diversity and board tenure. Originality/value: The extensive literature examines disclosure via traditional media and its determinants, yet this paper extends the literature by investigating the relatively new disclosure channel of social media. This study is among the first to utilize machine learning, instead of manual coding techniques, to automatically unveil the tweets' topics and reveal financial disclosure tweets. It is also among the first to investigate the relationships between several board characteristics and financial disclosure on Twitter; providing a distinction between the roles of executive vs non-executive directors relating to disclosure decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Annual reports are situated artefacts which relate a longitudinal grand narrative or corporate (auto)biography. This paper explores the narrative reporting of two former asbestos manufacturers, Turner & Newall in the UK and James Hardie in Australia. Asbestos features prominently in the industrial expansion and decline of both companies as the toxic health effects of this ‘magic mineral’ became evident over time. This paper finds evidence of several distinct phases of reporting of asbestos, from reporting it as a source of unmitigated value, to a source of risk and finally as a threat to corporate viability. Each stage erased or re-situated the prior story of asbestos so that users of individual annual reports may be unaware of the grand narrative of asbestos in its transformation from ‘magic mineral to killer dust’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]