Corporate financial disclosures in the UK, 1920–50: the effects of legislative change and managerial discretion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the period 1920–50, the legislative approach to corporate financial disclosure in the UK was transformed. Although the changes have been well covered in the literature, the actual levels and patterns of change in UK corporate disclosures, which reflect the effects of both legislative requirements and managerial discretion, have attracted relatively little attention. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a sound empirical basis for conclusions about disclosure practices in the UK across the second quarter of the last century. To that end, the paper provides a structured discussion of changes in corporate disclosures in the UK, based upon detailed analysis of a substantial and broadly based body of corporate data for the years 1920, 1935 and 1950. These dates provide, respectively, a starting point that falls within the coverage of the main existing studies of UK disclosures of the first quarter of the twentieth century, a mid-point that allows for evaluation of the effects of the Companies Acts 1928–9 and the Royal Mail case of 1931 and a closing date that incorporates the effects of the 1948 Act. The relationship between the state and the financial community and its various agencies are clearly of importance, and particular attention has been paid to the effects of managerial discretion on disclosures, given Edwards' view that criticisms aroused by the revelations of the Royal Mail case of 1931, ‘probably had a greater impact on the quality of published data than all the Companies Acts passed up to that date’.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".