To Change or Not to Change: The Informativeness of REIT Annual Reports

Increasingly similar corporate disclosures may fail to provide potential investors with adequate information about a company to facilitate astute, informed, and/or rational decision making. In light of this repeatedly expressed SEC concern, the current investigation uses a sample of 1,910 annual report (10-k) filings by 234 separate equity REITs from 2000-2020 to examine the impact of year-over-year linguistic similarity on the perceived information content of corporate disclosures. Consistent with the aforementioned concerns, we document a significant increase in the degree of REIT annual report similarity over time. Despite this trend, we find that innovations in annual report disclosures remain directly related to observable changes in both the operational complexity and financial position of the firm. Furthermore, these innovations engender significant market reactions including changes in options trading activity, annual report readability, and the firm’s cost of equity capital. Lastly, these findings are both robust to the inclusion of alternative information channels and are significantly more pronounced within informationally opaque market settings. In sum, we find REIT annual reports remain a value-relevant source of information for market participants.