Essays on reporting and information processing

The three essays collected in this PhD thesis concern internal and external reporting practices, narrative disclosures, recent advancements in reporting technologies, and the role of reporting in emerging markets. These essays utilize state-of-the-art empirical techniques drawn from computer science along with new data sources to study fundamental accounting questions. The first essay studies the relationship between reporting frequency and market pressure over social media in crowdfunding markets. The second essay studies the use of soft information in the context of internal bank lending decisions, in particular during a scenario of mandated changes to the location of decisions rights. The third essay studies the information retrieval process for narrative disclosures for users that vary in their financial literacy by combining innovative tracking techniques deployed on Amazon Mechanical Turk with state-of-the-art machine learning techniques.