A Study On The Impact Factors And Economics Consequences Of Management Discussion And Analysis Disclosure Behavior

Based on the perspective of textual analysis,this paper systematically studies the disclosure behavior of China’s listed companies’ management discussion and analysis disclosure(MD&A)around the logical lines of "influencing factors—text disclosure behavior—economic consequences".The research results show that as follow:Firstly,as the information discloser,the position of the secretary of board of directors has a significant impact on the quality of MD&A disclosure.When the position of the secretary of the board is high among the top management team,he or she is more capable of performing his or her duties,reducing the MD&A similarity and improving the quality of MD&A disclosure.Secondly,there are few documents discussing the consequences of R&D innovation.This article explores how R&D innovation affects disclosure behavior from the perspective of information disclosure costs in the context of poor intellectual property right protection in our country.It is found that considering the proprietary information cost of R&D innovation,management will adopt combined strategic disclosure behaviors to reduce MD&A’s information content,at the same time,tone management is used to make up for the lack of information content.Thirdly,textual information is the interpretation and supplement of numerical information,hence,numerical information disclosure directly affects textual information disclosure.This paper finds that the quality of numerical information and textual information quality are significantly negatively correlated,namely there is a phenomenon of overprinting.Fourthly,the more similar a company’s current year’s MD&A is to its prior year’s MD&A,or the more similar a company’s MD&A is to its peers’MD&As within the same industry in the same year,MD&A will convey less firm-specific information to market participants,and the company’s future stock price synchronicity will be higher.Lastly,the higher the abnormal similarity between a company’s MD&A current year’s MD&A is and its prior year’s MD&A,the more likely the management could have used the highly similar MD&A as a tool to conceal bad news,and the higher the future stock price crash risk.In sum,this article focuses on text similarity feature,theoretically analyzes and empirically explores how the three important factors,information discloser,information disclosure cost,and the quality of numerical information disclosure will affect MD&A disclosure behavior,and finds that MD&A disclosure is significantly related to stock price synchronicity and stock price crash risk,which ultimately has a impact on market pricing efficiency.The findings of this paper not only enrich the literature on the influencing factors of text disclosure,but also expand the literature on the economic consequences of text disclosure,and provide reference for policy makers to further improve the level of information disclosure of listed companies in our country.