The Ever-Expanding 10-K: Why are 10-Ks Getting so Much Longer (and Does it Matter)?

While characteristics of quantitative accounting data have received substantial attention in the academic literature, much less is known about the accompanying text. We document marked trends in 10-K disclosure over the period 1996-2013, with increases in length, boilerplate, stickiness, and redundancy and decreases in specificity, readability, and the relative amount of hard information. We use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to examine...