Readability of Quarterly Reports on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange

Master's Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject Business economics - Banking, Stock Exchanges, Insurance, Accounting, grade: 1, Vienna University of Economics and Business (Corporate Governance), language: English, abstract: Financial reports can be regarded as the primary means of communication between a company's management and its shareholders. The reports also address all other kinds of stakeholders like employees, suppliers, customers, competitors, governments, potential investors, bond holders and, in a broad sense, the entire society. One possible way of obscuring corporate information when results are negative, or of being forthcoming in disclosing information when results are good, is to adjust the reports' readability which can influence understandability as a consequence. There is a broad set of readability formulas that allow defining a level of text difficulty based on linguistic factors like sentence length as well as word length and characteristics. The underlying research question of this work shall be formulated as follows: 'What influences readability of letters to the shareholders of quarterly reports of publicly listed companies on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange?' This thesis contributes to existing literature in various ways. On the one hand, it is among the very few works that consider the influence of performance on the readability of German reports and, in addition, sets the focus on quarterly reports. On the other hand, it takes into account the dependence or independence of managers of their shareholders measured by the company's shareholder structure, industry, share price volatility and the size of firms. Moreover, it is examined whether there is a tendency that reports in different languages tend to have the same relative level of difficulty. In general, the thesis also examines and questions research methods of prior studies in the field of report readability.