The Danish Registry of Diabetic Retinopathy Andersen, Nis; Hjortdal, Jesper Østergaard; Schielke, Katja Christina ...
Clinical epidemiology,
01/2016, Letnik:
8
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
To monitor the development of diabetic eye disease in Denmark and to evaluate the accessibility and effectiveness of diabetic eye screening programs with focus on interregional variations.
The target ...population includes all patients diagnosed with diabetes. Denmark (5.5 million inhabitants) has ~320,000 diabetes patients with an annual increase of 27,000 newly diagnosed patients. The Danish Registry of Diabetic Retinopathy (DiaBase) collects data on all diabetes patients aged ≥18 years who attend screening for diabetic eye disease in hospital eye departments and in private ophthalmological practice. In 2014-2015, DiaBase included data collected from 77,968 diabetes patients.
The main variables provide data for calculation of performance indicators to monitor the quality of diabetic eye screening and development of diabetic retinopathy. Data with respect to age, sex, best corrected visual acuity, screening frequency, grading of diabetic retinopathy and maculopathy at each visit, progression/regression of diabetic eye disease, and prevalence of blindness were obtained. Data analysis from DiaBase's latest annual report (2014-2015) indicates that the prevalence of no diabetic retinopathy, nonproliferative diabetic retinopathy, and proliferative diabetic retinopathy is 78%, 18%, and 4%, respectively. The percentage of patients without diabetic maculopathy is 97%. The proportion of patients with regression of diabetic retinopathy (20%) is greater than the proportion of patients with progression of diabetic retinopathy (10%).
The collection of data from diabetic eye screening is still expanding in Denmark. Analysis of the data collected during the period 2014-2015 reveals an overall decrease of diabetic retinopathy compared to the previous year, although the number of patients newly diagnosed with diabetes has been increasing in Denmark. DiaBase is a useful tool to observe the quality of screening, prevalence, and progression/regression of diabetic eye disease.
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.
The clarity of an annual report is crucial for stakeholder understanding and trust, notably so in China, which is characterized by its unique high-context culture. This study investigates the impact ...of annual report readability on trade credit financing in Chinese listed companies. Beyond the measure derived from the Fog index, we employ innovative methodologies, including machine learning and the application of Chinese linguistic “hedge words”, to refine the understanding of the relationship between annual report readability and trade credit financing. Our findings indicate that poor readability significantly restricts firms’ access to trade credit financing, particularly for companies with limited international engagements and those with weaker product market power. These results remain consistent across different measures of report readability and trade credit financing.
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•Focusing on the readability of Chinese listed companies' annual reports, considering the unique linguistic and cultural context of China.•Innovative methodologies, incorporating machine learning and "hedge words", are used to analyze readability.•Poor readability significantly restricts firms' access to trade credit financing in China, access to trade credit financing, especially for those with limited international engagements or those with a weaker stance in the product market.•The results demonstrate robustness across a variety of measures.
Investors are one of the primary target audiences for corporate communication; they seek non-financial as well as financial information from the companies they invest in, and they consider the social ...and environmental sustainability of these companies in addition to their economic sustainability. Because of this, as a tool for investor relations, annual reports now routinely and regularly incorporate non-financial information. This study examined thirty annual reports from six public airline firms issued between 2018 and 2022. A total of 8115 expressions on social, economic, and environmental sustainability issues—divided into 125 themes—were coded and analyzed in Maxqda 2020. Among the conclusions was the fact that, in 2022, all of the examined companies devoted 9% of their pages to sustainability statements and included them as an individual topic in their reports. It was found that 64% of both the sustainability-related pages of the reports and the messages of the company managers included in the report consisted of social sustainability statements, with the theme of governance playing an important role in these explanations. Additionally, it was revealed that the topics of governance issues (22.6%), the natural environment (21.7%), and human resources development (15.5%) are the most frequently discussed social, environmental, and economic sustainability themes in corporate annual reports.
Empirical studies do not make a clear distinction between the quantity and quality of disclosure. As it is generally assumed that the quantity of information has an implication in determining its ...quality, quantity measures are often used as proxy for disclosure quality. Nonetheless, the measurement of the quality of disclosure is recognized as a relevant question that is still open and the importance of developing measures of disclosure quality is emphasized in literature.
This paper disputes the idea that the quantity of disclosure is a sound proxy for the quality of disclosure. The adoption of multidimensional frameworks for the appreciation of disclosure is discussed and an index for quality disclosure is proposed. Moving from the assumption that high-quality information should usefully support external users in the judgment of past and future performance, we hypothesize that high-quality disclosure is positively associated with accuracy and negatively associated with the dispersion of analysts' earnings forecasts.
We show analytically that the proposed framework captures dimensions of annual report disclosure that are considered useful by financial analysts in forecasting earnings and that the proposed measure of disclosure quality has a stronger positive statistical association with accuracy and a stronger negative association with the dispersion of financial analysts' earnings forecasts than a simple index of disclosure quantity has.
The paper consists of an empirical analysis on a sample of 180 listed banks by verifying four different hypotheses: (H1) The development of fintech contributes positively to the ESG performance of ...banks; (H2) Board size is negatively related to ESG performance of banks; (H3) The percentage of independent board members is positively related to ESG performance of banks; (H4) Gender diversity is positively related to ESG performance of banks. The fintech index has been developed by using the annual reports of companies included in the sample by adopting 10 keywords. Our approach is original because none of the extant contributions on the topic proposed any methodology to measure the level of fintech and define whether a bank is more fintech than another. Results indicates that a great level of fintech in banking sector improves significantly ESG performance. The relationship with board size is negative but not statistically significant, while are positive and relevant the relationships with the level of independence of the board and gender diversity.
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•Extension of the literature exploring the relationship between FinTech and ESG scores though an empirical analysis in the banking sector.•The paper consists of an empirical analysis on a sample of 180 listed banks by verifying four different hypotheses.•The fintech index has been developed by using the annual reports of companies included in the sample by adopting 10 keywords.•Results indicates that a great level of fintech in banking sector improves significantly ESG performance.
Does good news cover bad news? Meng, Qingbin; Ke, Shaojing; Zhao, Daxuan ...
Journal of business finance & accounting,
12/2023
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
Does good news cover bad news? We present evidence from the Chinese stock market, in which the fiscal year is always the same as the calendar year. Listed firms are required to announce ...their annual report by the end of April, coinciding with the deadline for the release of their first‐quarter reports. We find that firms with negative earnings surprises in the previous year are more likely to postpone the announcement of their annual report until they announce their first‐quarter report. However, we find no evidence to suggest that this bundling disclosure weakens market responses to information in annual reports.
We present primary descriptive data in the form of tables and graphs for patients treated with home hemodialysis in France and French-speaking Belgium in 2022. These data were recorded in the ...database of the French-speaking Register of Peritoneal Dialysis and Home Hemodialysis (RDPLF).
The average age of the patients is similar in both countries: 52.7 years in France and 54.7 years in Belgium. The percentage of patients with diabetes is 25.6% in Belgium and 18.5% in France.
The majority of patients undergo daily hemodialysis 5 to 7 times per week.
Of the patients, 11% have received peritoneal dialysis in the past. Of these, 23.5% transitioned to home hemodialysis less than 3 months after stopping peritoneal dialysis, while 23.6% transitioned after 2 years of center-based or self-administered hemodialysis.
Practices differ between Belgium and France. In Belgium, a central catheter is used in 57.5% of cases, compared to 8.5% in France. For arteriovenous fistula puncture, the buttonhole technique is used in 91% of cases in Belgium and 47.8% of cases in France.
In Belgium, 70% of patients dialyze independently, while in France, 71% of patients dialyze in the presence of a family member.
The main cause of treatment discontinuation is transplantation (44% of technical dropout).
Using a large panel of U.S. public firms, we examine the relation between annual report readability and cost of equity capital. We hypothesize that complex textual reporting deters investors' ability ...to process and interpret annual reports, leading to higher information risk, and thus higher cost of equity financing. Consistent with our prediction, we find that greater textual complexity is associated with higher cost of equity capital. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity checks, including use of multiple estimation methods, alternative proxies of annual report readability and cost of equity capital measures, and potential endogeneity concerns. In addition, we hypothesize and test whether the nature of the relation between readability and cost of capital depends on the tone of 10-K filings. Our results show that the effect of annual report complexity on cost of equity is greater when disclosure tone is more negative or more ambiguous. We also find that the effect of annual report readability on cost of equity capital depends on the degree of stock market competition, level of institutional investors' ownership, and analyst coverage.
•The lack of annual report readability increases cost of equity (CoE) in the U.S.•The effect of textual complexity on CoE is greater when disclosure tone is negative or ambiguous•The effect of textual complexity on CoE depends on the degree of stock market competition•Institutional ownership and analyst coverage lessen the effect of textual complexity•The 1998 SEC's plain English rules reduced the effect of textual complexity
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