arnann16083

European Accounting Review Special issue on Textual Analysis Research in Accounting
Call For Papers

European Accounting Review invites manuscripts for a Special issue on Textual Analysis Research in Accounting

Guest Editors:
Reuven Lehavy - University of Michigan, U.S.A
Florin P. Vasvari - London Business School, U.K.

This issue aims to advance the use of textual analysis research in accounting with the purpose of measuring the quantity and quality of information provided by financial disclosures to investigate accounting related research questions Textual disclosures may include news articles, earnings conference call transcripts, regulatory and tax filings, internal firm reports, social media postings, reports issued by market intermediaries and other textual disclosures. Textual analysis can cover computational linguistics, statistical language processing, information retrieval, content analysis or stylometrics to capture constructs such as the amount of disclosure, sentiment, similarity, style and readability.

While we encourage the implementation of both off-the-shelf textual methods borrowed from the computational linguistics, text mining and machine learning fields as well as the development of new methods, we urge the authors to investigate research questions that are motivated by hypotheses closely tied to economic theories.

OVERVIEW: There has been a growing trend of research involving textual information in accounting. This trend has been fueled by the increasing availability of large amounts of textual data that is available electronically in machine-readable forms as well as advancements in computational linguistics, content analysis, and natural language processing. An in-depth textual investigation of financial disclosures is necessary given that these disclosures consist mainly of unstructured textual information. The use of textual analysis methods to better understand the text is important for several reasons. First, the analysis can provide an insight into how the preparers of various reports and disclosures view the numeric firm-specific data that researchers have been analyzing using traditional statistical methods. Second, textual analysis can reveal preparers' incentives and characteristics which allow a better understanding of the corporate decision making process. For instance, textual analysis can reveal biases that might explain firm specific financing and investment decisions. Third, textual analysis can expose preparers' private information and perception about the performance of the firm or its decision makers. Fourth, computer-based textual analysis can facilitate the coding of large amounts of text, pushing the literature beyond small-sample analyses based on manually-collected data.

Textual analysis involves a critical transformation that converts large collections of textual information into quantitative measures of this information. The meaning of the text is often ambiguous, and depends substantively on the context of the sentence, the type of document, time of writing or the author. Textual analysis could therefore capture both intended and unintended information conveyed by the text and authors need to consider the advantages, as well as the limitations, of the textual analysis techniques employed.

TOPICS: Research topics appropriate for this special issue would include, but not be limited to, the following:
- Drivers of textual disclosures
- The informational content of textual disclosures with respect to market variables (e.g., pricing of equity and debt securities, the cost of capital, etc.)
- The ability of textual disclosures to predict future performance or firm decisions
- The effect of textual information on how market intermediaries (e.g., stock analysts, rating agencies, media)
- Textual analysis and managerial incentives
- Implications of differences in the characteristics of cross-country textual information
- How textual information helps meet regulatory requirements
- How textual disclosures vary across industries, time periods and firm characteristics

Following the EAR policy of openness and flexibility regarding methodologies and styles of conducting research, papers in all areas of accounting research (managerial, financial, tax, auditing, and ethics) will be considered.

PAPER SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: Papers submitted to this special section will be subject to a double blind review process. Authors are encouraged to contact the guest editors in advance should there be any matters on which they require clarification or guidance (rlehavy@umich.edu and fvasvari@london.edu).

Authors should strictly follow EAR submission guidelines which can be found at: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/authors/rearauth.asp. Submissions in electronic format (MSWord) should be made at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rear

The deadline for submissions is 30 November 2017. Submissions should not be sent before 1 October 2017.

There are plans to hold an EAR Symposium on the topic at the 2017 European Accounting Association Annual Meeting in Valencia from 10-12 May 2017. This session is moderated by the Guest Editors. It will present the objectives of the special issue and feature a few presentations on textual analysis, with the final intent to provide ideas to potential authors for the special issue.

Posted: 20 Dec 2016