Does Board Independence Influence Annual Report Readability?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine whether board independence improves the readability of annual reports. Using a sample of 11,938 firm-year observations over the period 1997–2016, we empirically show that board independence decreases the readability of annual reports. This result is consistent with the notion of managerial avoidance of costly board monitoring. We also run an array of cross-sectional tests to understand the settings in which the association is either more or less pronounced. Even though managerial ability and SEC’s Plain English Rule of 1998 improve readability, we find that the negative relationship between board independence and readability continues to persist. Our results also reveal that directors’ tenure and CEO duality attenuate the board independence–readability relationship, while CEO tenure enhances this association. Overall, our findings provide additional insights into the link between board independence and annual report readability.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.015 |
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 it