Analysing narratives in the Corporate Financial Information Environment. Transparent and effective communication between firms and the investment community is a key determinant of corporate success. Audited financial statements and associated narrative disclosures are among the main methods that firms use to communicate with investors and analysts. These disclosures combine with information from financial journalists and other market commentators to form the Corporate Financial Information Environment (CFIE). While a considerable body of work exists on financial narratives, research has been limited by the methods used for measuring the characteristics and quality of such disclosures. In particular, the need to hand-collect relevant data from firms’ annual reports and the subjectivity of textual scoring based on manual methods has restricted progress. Recent advances in computational and corpus linguistics provide a basis for undertaking more sophisticated analyses.

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