Textual documents proliferate throughout accounting practice (Fisher, Garnsey, Goel, and Tam 2010). How to efficiently use these accounting textual documents has attracted much attention from accounting researchers. Various textual documents, such as corporate textual disclosures to accounting standards, have been studied in prior accounting literature for different purposes, ranging from dictionary development, to future performance predictions, to standard formalization (Loughran and McDonald 2016). Since the goal of this theme issue is to present the state-of-the-art textual analysis research in accounting, five papers included in this theme issue cover a variety of facets of research on textual analysis including the extension of certain well-studied research topics, as well as novel research designs.
As noted before, corporate textual disclosures are major objects of current accounting textual analysis research. Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A), as an important component of the 10-K and 10-Q, is one of the most studied...
