财务报表附注披露的分析【外文翻译】_精品.doc

外文文献翻译译文 原文： Manufacturing Corporate Identities: An Analysis of Financial Statement Footnote Disclosures Financial reporting of organizational performance is facilitated primarily through financial statements and the related supplemental disclosures found in the annual report or Form 10-K. Standardized financial statements, such as the income statement, balance sheet and statement of cash flows, are mostly uniform in format and thus provide for inter-firm comparisons of various financial metrics. This “boilerplate” format provides for simple “net income” or “current assets” comparisons between firms given the uniformity of the content contained within each financial statement; however, there are supplemental disclosures contained within these reports that should provide additional information to illuminate and thereby enhance the financial statement content. We previously studied a McDonald-ized or scripted boilerplate discourse in place for corporate financial reporting that extended beyond the financial statement format (Hillon Smith, 2004). Due to the lack of specific requirements on management discussion and analysis and financial disclosure footnote formatting, the prevailing theory on organizational identity suggests that firms should use financial narratives to differentiate themselves from their competitors thereby manufacturing their corporate identity. Given this, we expected to find a wide array of supplemental reporting content that was also as unique and differentiable as the firms themselves. To test this we obtained a random sample from the SP 500 Index of firms and examined the frequency distributions of the number of footnotes and related page number totals contained in each of the supplemental financial footnote disclosures from each firm within our sample. We found a clustering tendency, which is suggestive of a homogeneous rather than heterogeneous firm identity. We next performed a content analysis of the supplemental footnote disclosures. When