ABSTRACT We examine the relation between political uncertainty and narrative disclosure complexity in conference calls. Using firm-level political uncertainty, we find that political uncertainty is positively associated with firms’ disclosures complexity as measured by the Fog index. Decomposing complexity into two latent components—information and obfuscation—we show that political uncertainty significantly increases the obfuscation but has no impact on the information. Further analysis reveals that complex disclosure is motivated by expected poor future performance amid political uncertainty. We also show that, during periods of heightened political uncertainty, obfuscated disclosure is associated with reduced earnings informativeness, increased dispersion in analyst forecasts, and higher volatility in forecast revisions. These findings are robust to including and excluding sentences containing complex political bigrams when calculating Fog. Further evidence shows that, during periods of political uncertainty, managers tend to use a more ambiguous tone and provide scripted and shorter (longer) responses to analysts’ questions (presentations).

中文翻译：

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政治不确定性是否会混淆叙事披露？


摘要我们研究了电话会议中政治不确定性与叙述披露复杂性之间的关系。利用公司层面的政治不确定性，我们发现政治不确定性与雾指数衡量的公司披露复杂性呈正相关。将复杂性分解为两个潜在组成部分——信息和混淆——我们发现政治不确定性显着增加了混淆，但对信息没有影响。进一步的分析表明，复杂的披露是由于政治不确定性下预期未来业绩不佳所致。我们还表明，在政治不确定性加剧期间，模糊披露与盈利信息性减少、分析师预测分散性加大以及预测修正波动性加大有关。这些发现对于在计算 Fog 时包含和排除包含复杂政治二元组的句子来说是稳健的。进一步的证据表明，在政治不确定时期，管理者倾向于使用更加模糊的语气，并对分析师的问题（演示）提供有脚本的、更短（更长）的答复。