Assessing the Role of Corporate Disclosure Policies in Strengthening Investor Protection and Accountability

Posted: Oct 29, 2023

• John Martinez
• John Thompson
• Joseph Campbell

Abstract

This research presents a novel computational framework for evaluating corporate disclosure policies through the lens of investor protection and accountability mechanisms. Traditional approaches to corporate governance analysis have primarily relied on manual content analysis and standardized scoring systems, which often fail to capture the nuanced relationships between disclosure quality, investor protection, and corporate accountability. Our methodology introduces a hybrid natural language processing and network analysis approach that quantifies disclosure policy effectiveness across multiple dimensions including transparency, comprehensiveness, timeliness, and accessibility. We developed a proprietary corpus of 15,000 corporate disclosure documents from Fortune 500 companies spanning 2018-2023, which we analyzed using transformer-based language models fine-tuned for financial regulatory compliance assessment. The system identifies latent patterns in disclosure language that correlate with investor protection outcomes, including reduced information asymmetry and enhanced market efficiency. Our findings reveal three distinct disclosure policy archetypes—proactive comprehensive, reactive minimal, and strategic selective—each demonstrating different impacts on investor protection metrics. The results indicate that companies implementing proactive comprehensive disclosure policies experience 27