{"title":"Impact of judgment readability on financial crimes","authors":"Jalaj Pathak","doi":"10.1016/j.frl.2025.106779","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Using NLP techniques, we extract the financial judgments from the overall set of supreme court judgments and find a one-unit increase in readability, implying harder-to-comprehend supreme court judgments, is significantly associated with a 2% increase in financial crimes for the next year. The results hold true for different categories of financial crimes and are robust to the other proxies for readability. This is in line with the theories of how the comprehensibility of the judgments often leaves scope for debate and calls for easier-to-read and comprehensible judgments so that such loopholes can be avoided.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12167,"journal":{"name":"Finance Research Letters","volume":"75 ","pages":"Article 106779"},"PeriodicalIF":7.4000,"publicationDate":"2025-01-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Finance Research Letters","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1544612325000443","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"BUSINESS, FINANCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Using NLP techniques, we extract the financial judgments from the overall set of supreme court judgments and find a one-unit increase in readability, implying harder-to-comprehend supreme court judgments, is significantly associated with a 2% increase in financial crimes for the next year. The results hold true for different categories of financial crimes and are robust to the other proxies for readability. This is in line with the theories of how the comprehensibility of the judgments often leaves scope for debate and calls for easier-to-read and comprehensible judgments so that such loopholes can be avoided.
期刊介绍:
Finance Research Letters welcomes submissions across all areas of finance, aiming for rapid publication of significant new findings. The journal particularly encourages papers that provide insight into the replicability of established results, examine the cross-national applicability of previous findings, challenge existing methodologies, or demonstrate methodological contingencies.
Papers are invited in the following areas:
Actuarial studies
Alternative investments
Asset Pricing
Bankruptcy and liquidation
Banks and other Depository Institutions
Behavioral and experimental finance
Bibliometric and Scientometric studies of finance
Capital budgeting and corporate investment
Capital markets and accounting
Capital structure and payout policy
Commodities
Contagion, crises and interdependence
Corporate governance
Credit and fixed income markets and instruments
Derivatives
Emerging markets
Energy Finance and Energy Markets
Financial Econometrics
Financial History
Financial intermediation and money markets
Financial markets and marketplaces
Financial Mathematics and Econophysics
Financial Regulation and Law
Forecasting
Frontier market studies
International Finance
Market efficiency, event studies
Mergers, acquisitions and the market for corporate control
Micro Finance Institutions
Microstructure
Non-bank Financial Institutions
Personal Finance
Portfolio choice and investing
Real estate finance and investing
Risk
SME, Family and Entrepreneurial Finance