Capabilities-related disclosures and investors’ recognition of organisational resilience – an automated textual analysis of 10-K filings

We show that voluntarily provided accounting information relating to the capabilities of firms to create slack, support learning, and foster innovation are associated with investors’ recognition of organisational resilience (i.e. specific share price patterns) during an adverse event (COVID-19). To quantify the extent of pre-crisis capabilities-related information, we apply an automated textual analysis to voluntary disclosures in the Item 1 and Item 7 of 10-K filings in a cross-sectional sample of firms listed in the S&P 1500 Index (2018–2022). We use the share prices of our sample firms to create three capital market indicators of organisational resilience, i.e. firms’ absorption, adaptation, and transformation levels amid adversity. We find that disclosures about slack capabilities are negatively associated with an immediate decrease in the share price that occurs at the onset of adversity (absorption). For most sample firms, our results also suggest that disclosures about slack, learning, and innovation capabilities accelerate the share price recovery (adaptation), while disclosures about innovation capabilities appear to increase the share price in the longer term (transformation). Our results indicate that capabilities-related disclosures are differently associated with investor reactions as firms progress through sequential stages of adversity and add incremental value to existing measures of financial performance.