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Cited by 1,446

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 40 of the 40 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Measuring Readability in Financial Disclosures

LOUGHRAN, TIM, MCDONALD, BILL·2014·The Journal of Finance
DOI 10.1111/jofi.12162
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Abstract

Defining and measuring readability in the context of financial disclosures becomes important with the increasing use of textual analysis and the Securities and Exchange Commission's plain English initiative. We propose defining readability as the effective communication of valuation‐relevant information. The Fog Index—the most commonly applied readability measure—is shown to be poorly specified in financial applications. Of Fog's two components, one is misspecified and the other is difficult to measure. We report that 10‐K document file size provides a simple readability proxy that outperforms the Fog Index, does not require document parsing, facilitates replication, and is correlated with alternative readability constructs.

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Metadata

Authors
LOUGHRAN, T., & MCDONALD, B.
Venue
The Journal of Finance
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2014-07-18
Volume
69
Issue
4
Pages
1643-1671
ISSN
  • 0022-1082 (ISSN-L)
  • 1540-6261
DOI
10.1111/jofi.12162
OpenAlex
W2313281002
Cited by
1,446
References
40
FWCI
257.73
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Measuring Readability in Financial Disclosures. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/jofi.12162
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LOUGHRAN, T., & MCDONALD, B. (2014). Measuring Readability in Financial Disclosures. The Journal of Finance. https://doi.org/10.1111/jofi.12162

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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.