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Blockholder Heterogeneity And Corporate Textual Disclosure Quality, Xiaoxiao Yu

Accounting Dissertations

This study investigates whether and how different types of blockholders affect a firm’s textual disclosure quality. Using a hand-collected blockholder-firm panel sample from 2011 to 2016, I find that, on average, both the aggregate blockholder ownership and the total number of blockholders are negatively associated with the readability of firms’ 10-K reports, after controlling for the numerical quality of earnings. When blockholders are categorized into different groups based on their filing choices and their affiliations with management, I find that firms with greater number of unaffiliated 13D filers write more readable 10-K reports while firms with both greater number and …