Events

Prof. Wei Jiang
Arthur F. Burns Professor of Free and Competitive Enterprise
Columbia Business School

Growing AI readership, proxied by expected machine downloads, motivates firms to prepare filings that are friendlier to machine parsing and processing. Firms avoid words that are perceived as negative by computational algorithms, as compared to those deemed negative only by dictionaries meant for human readers. The publication of Loughran and McDonald (2011) serves as an instrumental event attributing the difference-in-differences in the measured sentiment to machine readership. High machine-readership firms also exhibit speech emotion assessed as embodying more positivity and excitement by audio processors. This is the first study exploring the feedback effect on corporate disclosure in response to technology.