Between 2010 and 2017, Chinese investors used an investor interactive platform (IIP) to ask public companies around 2.5 million questions, the vast majority of which received a reply within two weeks. We analyze these IIP dialogues using a BERT-based algorithm and provide preliminary evidence on their causes and consequences. Our analyses show most questions reflect investors’ difficulties in processing information already in the public domain. Controlling for other news, higher IIP activity is associated with increases in trading volume, return volatility, market liquidity, and price informativeness as well as decreases in bid-ask spread. Financial statement-related postings increase around the adoption of new accounting standards. Collectively, our results show that investors face significant information processing costs but that IIP activities help reduce these costs, leading to improvements in stock price formation.

The distribution of power in the political system shapes the financial reporting opacity of banks. Specifically, banks located in states with senators on the Senate Banking Committee (BC senators) have greater abnormal loan loss provisions than banks in other states. The result is stronger for larger banks and banks with higher risk. In addition, BC senators have a negative effect on the likelihood of banks in their home states receiving enforcement actions, and, more importantly, this effect is stronger for more opaque banks. These findings suggest that politicians, regulators, and banks use opaque financial reporting to facilitate regulatory forbearance. Moreover, we show that opacity is a significant channel through which BC senators increase bank risk. During economic downturns, however, BC senators appear to promote bank opacity to encourage bank lending and create liquidity. Finally, the capital market does not penalize the reporting opacity of banks in states with BC senators.

We develop and evaluate an accounting-based Loan Portfolio Risk (LPR) variable that captures time-varying contagion effects in default risk for a portfolio of bank loans. Our results show that an Equity-to-LPR ratio (ELPR) is additive in predicting bank failure up to five years in advance, after controlling for all the capital adequacy, asset quality, management experience, earnings, liquidity, and sensitivity to market risks (CAMELS) variables as well as other fundamental-based bank risk measures from prior studies. Further, we find that publicly listed banks with higher ELPR have lower market-implied costs of capital, especially under market stress conditions. We conclude that ELPR captures key aspects of bank risk that are missing in current Basel Committee risk-weighted-asset calculations.