Reporting strategies: What makes family firms beat around the bush? Family-related antecedents of annual report readability

Abstract

We investigate the heterogeneity of reporting strategies across family firms by focusing on the readability of annual reports. Adopting the socioemotional wealth perspective, we introduce three family-related antecedents of annual report readability to accounting and family business literature: family power, the overlap between family and firm name, and generational stage. Our findings, based on the textual analysis of 288 annual reports of Italian listed family firms, reveal that annual report readability increases at higher levels of family power, decreases at later generational stages, and when the firm carries the family name.