Prior literature has shown that corporate transparency is linked to a firm’s competitiveness. The frequently noted vagueness and inadequacy of reported risk disclosures have been accompanied by calls for industry-specific studies. This paper aims to examine the disclosure informativeness of leading multinational automobile firms worldwide regarding firm-specific risks, namely company risk and company size. Applying a content analysis to examine the prevalent disclosure context in the automotive industry, we analyze and classify the annually reported risk statements of 34 multinationals quoted within the NASDAQ OMX Global Automobile Index. These corporations are headquartered in 10 countries, located in the U.S. as well as in the E.U. and in Asia. Based on an employed Wilcoxon signed rank test, our results show that automobile multinationals favor revealing fewer (more) forward-looking and bad-news risk disclosures as compared to past-looking and good-news risk statements. Our findings further indicate that bigger and riskier automobile multinationals do not reveal larger amounts of risk information. This finding is inconsistent with disclosure theory and provides insight into less complex risk reporting practices that affect investor perceptions of risk by omitting risk information. This paper also provides new empirical evidence regarding the association between company risk and corporate risk disclosing practices in the auto industry; our data show that company size did not play a significant role. With our concentration on explaining current risk reporting practices in the automotive sector, these results are robust with respect to firm-specific risk variables, thus the findings may prove usable for policy frameworks.

中文翻译：

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上市公司风险报告实践：来自汽车行业的跨国经验证据

先前的文献表明，公司透明度与公司的竞争力有关。报告的风险披露经常被注意到的模糊性和不充分性伴随着对特定行业研究的呼吁。本文旨在研究全球领先的跨国汽车公司在公司特定风险（即公司风险和公司规模）方面的披露信息量。应用内容分析来检查汽车行业的普遍披露背景，我们对纳斯达克 OMX 全球汽车指数中引用的 34 家跨国公司的年度报告风险声明进行分析和分类。这些公司的总部设在 10 个国家，分别位于美国、欧盟和亚洲。基于采用的 Wilcoxon 符号秩检验，我们的研究结果表明，与过去的前瞻性和好消息风险声明相比，汽车跨国公司倾向于披露更少（更多）的前瞻性和坏消息风险披露。我们的研究结果进一步表明，规模更大、风险更高的汽车跨国公司并没有透露更多的风险信息。这一发现与披露理论不一致，并提供了对通过省略风险信息影响投资者风险感知的不太复杂的风险报告实践的洞察力。本文还提供了关于汽车行业公司风险与公司风险披露实践之间关联的新经验证据；我们的数据显示，公司规模并未发挥重要作用。我们专注于解释汽车行业当前的风险报告实践，