Share:


Mining risk-related sentiment in corporate annual reports and its effect on financial performance

    Renáta Myšková Affiliation
    ; Petr Hájek Affiliation

Abstract

Models that predict corporate financial risk are important early-warning systems for corporate stakeholders. Most models to date have been developed using financial indicators. However, in financial decision-making, increasing attention is being paid to the role of textual information, which may provide additional insight into managerial opinions and intentions and which has recently been used to more effectively predict corporate financial performance. Previous approaches in this regard have predominantly focused on sentiment analysis of managerial communication. However, the role of context-related sentiment remains poorly understood in the financial risk domain. Here, we investigate how risk-related sentiment in verbal managerial communication might predict corporate financial performance, including indebtedness, profitability, market value and bankruptcy risk. To ensure deductive content validity, we propose specific word lists for each type of corporate financial risk and assign each word with positive / negative labels. Our findings provide evidence for a major role of risk-related sentiment as an indicator of corporate performance in terms of financial risks. Notably, using novel risk-related word lists in regression models, we show that a proactive and opportunity-seeking risk management has a significantly positive impact on financial performance, implying that stakeholders should carefully consider the risk-related managerial communication in corporate annual reports.


First published online 19 November 2020

Keyword : sentiment, financial risk, annual report, managerial communication, financial performance

How to Cite
Myšková, R., & Hájek, P. (2020). Mining risk-related sentiment in corporate annual reports and its effect on financial performance. Technological and Economic Development of Economy, 26(6), 1422-1443. https://doi.org/10.3846/tede.2020.13758
Published in Issue
Nov 26, 2020
Abstract Views
1911
PDF Downloads
1247
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

References

Altman, E. I. (1968). Financial ratios, discriminant analysis and the prediction of corporate bankruptcy. The Journal of Finance, 23(4), 589–609. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.1968.tb00843.x

Altman, E. I., Iwanicz‐Drozdowska, M., Laitinen, E. K., & Suvas, A. (2017). Financial distress prediction in an international context: A review and empirical analysis of Altman’s Z‐score model. Journal of International Financial Management & Accounting, 28(2), 131–171. https://doi.org/10.1111/jifm.12053

Anton, S. G., & Nucu, A. E. A. (2019). Firm value and corporate cash holdings. Empirical evidence from the Polish listed firms. E&M Economics and Management, 22(3), 121–134. https://doi.org/10.15240/tul/001/2019-3-008

Arora, M. P., & Lodhia, S. (2016). The BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill: Exploring the link between social and environmental disclosures and reputation risk management. Journal of Cleaner Production, 140(Part 3), 1287–1297. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.10.027

Bodnaruk, A., Loughran, T., & McDonald, B. (2015). Using 10-k text to gauge financial constraints. Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, 50(4), 623–646. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022109015000411

Bunget, O. C., Blidisel, R. G., Feleaga, L., & Popa, I. E. (2014). Empirical study of intangible assets in Romanian municipalities. E&M Economics and Management, 17(3), 136–151. https://doi.org/10.15240/tul/001/2014-3-011

Bužinskienė, R. (2017). Determination of the value of intangible assets in the companies of Lithuania. Economics and Culture, 14(2), 55–68. https://doi.org/10.1515/jec-2017-0018

Cai, L., & He, C. (2014). Corporate environmental responsibility and equity prices. Journal of Business Ethics, 125(4), 617–635. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1935-4

Cecchini, M., Aytug, H., Koehler, G. J., & Pathak, P. (2010). Making words work: Using financial text as a predictor of financial events. Decision Support Systems, 50(1), 164–175. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2010.07.012

Chang, Y., Benson, K., & Faff, R. (2017). Are excess cash holdings more valuable to firms in times of crisis? Financial constraints and governance matters. Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, 45, 157–173. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pacfin.2016.05.007

Chen, P. H., Ong, C. F., & Hsu, S. C. (2017). Understanding the relationships between environmental management practices and financial performances of multinational construction firms. Journal of Cleaner Production, 139, 750–760. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.08.109

Chen, W., Niebel, T., & Saam, M. (2016). Are intangibles more productive in ICT-intensive industries? Evidence from EU countries. Telecommunications Policy, 40(5), 471–484. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.telpol.2015.09.010

Clarkson, P. M., Fang, X., Li, Y., & Richardson, G. (2013). The relevance of environmental disclosures: Are such disclosures incrementally informative? Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, 32(5), 410–431. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaccpubpol.2013.06.008

Clausen, S., & Hirth, S. (2016). Measuring the value of intangibles. Journal of Corporate Finance, 40, 110–127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcorpfin.2016.07.012

Cormier, D., & Magnan, M., (2015). The economic relevance of environmental disclosure and its impact on corporate legitimacy: An empirical investigation. Business Strategy and the Environment, 24(6), 431–450. https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.1829

Cosmulese, C. G., Socoliuc, M., Ciubotariu, M. S., Mihaila, S., & Grosu, V. (2019). An empirical analysis of stakeholders’ expectations and integrated reporting quality. Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja, 32(1), 3963–3986. https://doi.org/10.1080/1331677X.2019.1680303

Deaconu, A., Crisan, S., & Buiga, A. (2016). Value allocation – Contribution and risk to the reliability of financial reporting. E&M Economics and Management, 19(2), 105–119. https://doi.org/10.15240/tul/001/2016-2-007

DellaVigna, S., & Pollet, J. (2009). Investor inattention and Friday earnings announcements. The Journal of Finance, 64(2), 709–749. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.2009.01447.x

Džunić, M., & Golubović, N. (2018). Perceived corruption in business environment: Exploring the underlying causes. E&M Economics and Management, 21(4), 48–64. https://doi.org/10.15240/tul/001/2018-4-004

Eidelwein, F., Collatto, D., Rodrigues, L., Lacerda, D., & Piran, F. (2018). Internalization of environmental externalities: Development of a method for elaborating the statement of economic and environmental results. Journal of Cleaner Production, 170, 1316–1327. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.09.208

Fama, E. F., & French, K. R. (2000). Forecasting profitability and earnings. The Journal of Business, 73(2), 161–175. https://doi.org/10.1086/209638

Fazzari, S. M., & Variato, A. M. (2015). Asymmetric information and Keynesian theories of investment. Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, 16(3), 351–370. https://doi.org/10.1080/01603477.1994.11489990

Fejes, J. (2018). The role of intangible assets in the banking value creation process [PhD Thesis]. Corvinus University Budapest. http://phd.lib.uni-corvinus.hu/995/18/Fejes_Jozsef_ten.pdf

Flammer, C. (2013). Corporate social responsibility and shareholder reaction: The environmental awareness of investors. Academy of Management Journal, 56(3), 758–781. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2011.0744

Frank, M. Z., & Goyal, V. K. (2009). Capital structure decisions: which factors are reliably important? Financial Management, 38(1), 1–37. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1755-053X.2009.01026.x

Fuente, J. A., Garcia-Sanchez, I. M., & Lozano, M. B. (2016). The role of the board of directors in the adoption of GRI guidelines for the disclosure of CSR information. Journal of Cleaner Production, 141, 737–750. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.09.155

Gastineau, G. L., & Kritzman, M. P. (1999). Dictionary of financial risk management (Vol. 52). John Wiley & Sons.

Ghosh, C. A. (1993). Regret-theoretic explanation of corporate dividend policy. Journal of Business Finance and Accounting, 20(4), 559–573. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5957.1993.tb00274.x

Goel, S., & Uzuner, O. (2016). Do sentiments matter in fraud detection? Estimating semantic orientation of annual reports. Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance and Management, 23(3), 215–239. https://doi.org/10.1002/isaf.1392

Gray, G. L., & Debreceny, R. S. (2014). A taxonomy to guide research on the application of data mining to fraud detection in financial statement audits. International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, 15(4), 357–380. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.accinf.2014.05.006

Greco, M., Cricelli, L., & Grimaldi, M. (2013). A strategic management framework of tangible and intangible assets. European Management Journal, 31(1), 55–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emj.2012.10.005

Groth, S. S., & Muntermann, J. (2011). An intraday market risk management approach based on textual analysis. Decision Support Systems, 50(4), 680–691. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2010.08.019

Guenster, N., Bauer, R., Derwall, J., & Koedijk, K. (2011). The economic value of corporate eco- efficiency. European Financial Management, 17(4), 679–704. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-036X.2009.00532.x

Haimes, Y. Y. (2009). On the complex definition of risk: A systems‐based approach. Risk Analysis, 29(12), 1647–1654. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6924.2009.01310.x

Hajek, P. (2018). Combining bag-of-words and sentiment features of annual reports to predict abnormal stock returns. Neural Computing and Applications, 29(7), 343–358. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-017-3194-2

Hajek, P., & Henriques, R. (2017). Mining corporate annual reports for intelligent detection of financial statement fraud – A comparative study of machine learning methods. Knowledge-Based Systems, 128, 139–152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2017.05.001

Hajek, P., Olej, V., & Myskova, R. (2014). Forecasting corporate financial performance using sentiment in annual reports for stakeholders’ decision-making. Technological and Economic Development of Economy, 20(4), 721–738. https://doi.org/10.3846/20294913.2014.979456

Henry, E., & Leone, A. J. (2016). Measuring qualitative information in capital markets research: Comparison of alternative methodologies to measure disclosure tone. The Accounting Review, 91(1), 153–178. https://doi.org/10.2308/accr-51161

Huang, X., Teoh, S. H., & Zhang, Y. (2014). Tone management. The Accounting Review, 89(3), 1083– 1113. https://doi.org/10.2308/accr-50684

Jordão, R. V. D., & Almeida, V. R. D. (2017). Performance measurement, intellectual capital and financial sustainability. Journal of Intellectual Capital, 18(3), 643–666. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-11-2016-0115

Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (2013). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. In Handbook of the fundamentals of financial decision making (Part I, pp. 99–127). World Scientific. https://doi.org/10.1142/9789814417358_0006

Kearney, C., & Liu, S. (2014). Textual sentiment in finance: A survey of methods and models. International Review of Financial Analysis, 33, 171–185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.irfa.2014.02.006

Kerzner, H. (2009). Project management: A systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling. John Wiley.

Kubenka, M., & Myskova, R. (2019). Obvious and hidden features of corporate default in bankruptcy models. Journal of Business Economics and Management, 20(2), 368–383. https://doi.org/10.3846/jbem.2019.9612

Kumar, A., Cantor, D. E., Grimm, C. M., & Hofer, C. (2017). Environmental management rivalry and firm performance. Journal of Strategy and Management, 10(2), 227–247. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSMA-11-2015-0089

Kumar, B. S., & Ravi, V. (2016). A survey of the applications of text mining in financial domain. Knowledge-Based Systems, 114, 128–147. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2016.10.003

Li, J., Feng, Y., Li, G., & Sun, X. (2020). Tourism companies’ risk exposures on text disclosure. Annals of Tourism Research, 84, 102986. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2020.102986

Liu, X., & Zhang, C. (2016). Corporate governance, social responsibility information disclosure, and enterprise value in China. Journal of Cleaner Production, 142(Part 2), 1075–1084. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.09.102

López-Gracia, J., & Sogorb-Mira, F. (2015). Financial constraints and cash–cash flow sensitivity. Applied Economics, 47(10), 1037–1049. https://doi.org/10.1080/00036846.2014.987918

Loughran, T., & McDonald, B. (2011). When is a liability not a liability? Textual analysis, dictionaries, and 10‐Ks. The Journal of Finance, 66(1), 35–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6261.2010.01625.x

Loughran, T., & McDonald, B. (2016). Textual analysis in accounting and finance: A survey. Journal of Accounting Research, 54(4), 1187–1230. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-679X.12123

Maheshwari, Y., & Rao, K. T. V. (2017). Determinants of corporate cash holdings. Global Business Review, 18(2), 416–427. https://doi.org/10.1177/0972150916668610

Manzoor, M. S., Rehman, R., Usman, M. I., & Ahmad, M. I. (2019). How corporate governance and CSR disclosure affect firm performance? E&M Economics and Management, 22(3), 20–35. https://doi.org/10.15240/tul/001/2019-3-002

Marc, M., Sprčić, D. M., & Žagar, M. M. (2018). Is enterprise risk management a value added activity? E&M Economics and Management, 21(1), 68–84. https://doi.org/10.15240/tul/001/2018-1-005

Marty, T., Vanstone, B., & Hahn, T. (2020). News media analytics in finance: A survey. Accounting & Finance, 60(2), 1385–1434. https://doi.org/10.1111/acfi.12466

Mengelkamp, A., Hobert, S., & Schumann, M. (2015). Corporate credit risk analysis utilizing textual user generated content – A Twitter based feasibility study. In Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) Proceedings, 236.

Myskova, R., & Hajek, P. (2016). The effect of managerial sentiment on market-to-book ratio. Transformations in Business & Economics, 15(2A), 498–513.

Myskova, R., & Hajek, P. (2017). Comprehensive assessment of firm financial performance using financial ratios and linguistic analysis of annual reports. Journal of International Studies, 10(4), 96–108. https://doi.org/10.14254/2071-8330.2017/10-4/7

Myskova, R., & Hajek, P. (2018). Sustainability and corporate social responsibility in the text of annual reports – The case of the IT services industry. Sustainability, 10(11), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.3390/su10114119

Osinski, M., Selig, P. M., Matos, F., & Roman, D. J. (2017). Methods of evaluation of intangible assets and intellectual capital. Journal of Intellectual Capital, 18(3), 470–485. https://doi.org/10.1108/JIC-12-2016-0138

Pejic Bach, M., Krstic, Z., Seljan, S., & Turulja, L. (2019). Text mining for big data analysis in financial sector: A literature review. Sustainability, 11(5), 1277. https://doi.org/10.3390/su11051277

Peng, Y., Wang, G., Kou, G., & Shi, Y. (2011). An empirical study of classification algorithm evaluation for financial risk prediction. Applied Soft Computing, 11(2), 2906–2915. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2010.11.028

Pröllochs, N., & Feuerriegel, S. (2020). Business analytics for strategic management: Identifying and assessing corporate challenges via topic modeling. Information & Management, 57(1), 103070. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2018.05.003

Salameh, A., & Bashir, H. (2013). Intangible assets and stock price of Jordanian companies: An empirical analysis. European Journal of Business and Social Sciences, 2(9), 153–165. https://doi.org/10.5430/afr.v5n2p154

Sejkora, F., & Duspiva, P. (2015). The position of management of Czech join-stock companies on dividend policy. E&M Economics and Management, 18(2), 73–88. https://doi.org/10.15240/tul/001/2015-2-006

Short, J. C., Broberg, J. C., Cogliser, C. C., & Brigham, K. H. (2010). Construct validation using computer-aided text analysis (CATA) an illustration using entrepreneurial orientation. Organizational Research Methods, 13(2), 320–347. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094428109335949

Smales, L. A. (2016). News sentiment and bank credit risk. Journal of Empirical Finance, 38(Part A), 37–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jempfin.2016.05.002

Smalt, S. W., & McComb, J. M. (2016). Accounting for internally generated intangible assets. International Journal of Accounting and Taxation, 4(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.15640/ijat.v4n1a1

Song, H., Zhao, C., & Zeng, J. (2017). Can environmental management improve financial performance: An empirical study of A-shares listed companies in China. Journal of Cleaner Production, 141, 1051–1056. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.09.105

Stulz, R. (2013). How companies can use hedging to create shareholder value. Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, 25(4), 21–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/jacf.12038

Sulub, S. A. (2014). Testing the predictive power of Altman’s revised Z’ model: The case of 10 multinational companies. Research Journal of Finance and Accounting, 5(21), 174–184.

Tong, Z. (2014). Deviations from optimal corporate cash holdings and the valuation from a shareholder’s perspective. Applied Economics, 46(30), 3695–3707. https://doi.org/10.1080/00036846.2014.939374

Tsai, F. T., Lu, H. M., & Hung, M. W. (2016). The impact of news articles and corporate disclosure on credit risk valuation. Journal of Banking & Finance, 68, 100–116. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbankfin.2016.03.018

Tsai, M. F., & Wang, Ch. J. (2017). On the risk prediction and analysis of soft information in finance reports. European Journal of Operational Research, 257(1), 243–250. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2016.06.069

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. (2019). Filings & forms – EDGAR system. https://ww.sec.gov/edgar.shtml

Van Dalen, A., De Vreese, C. H., & Albaek, E. (2017). Mediated uncertainty: The negative impact of uncertainty in economic news on consumer confidence. Public Opinion Quarterly, 81(1), 111–130. https://doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfw039

Vojinović, Ž., Milutinović, S., & Leković, B. (2020). Micro-specific profitability factors of the Serbian insurance industry: A panel data estimation. E&M Economics and Management, 23(1), 135–155. https://doi.org/10.15240/tul/001/2020-1-010

Walls, J. L., Berrone, P., & Phan, P. H. (2012). Corporate governance and environmental performance: Is there really a link? Strategic Management Journal, 33(8), 885–913. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.1952

Yang, R., Yu, Y., Liu, M., & Wu, K. (2018). Corporate risk disclosure and audit fee: A text mining approach. European Accounting Review, 27(3), 583–594. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638180.2017.1329660