In this paper, we analyze whether the textual complexity of tax bills affects financial markets. Based on the Flesch-Kincaid grade level of the 32 tax bills identified by Romer (Am Econ Rev 100(3):763–801, 2010)in the period 1962–2003, we assess the relationship between tax bills’ textual complexity and financial markets in various windows around the signing of a bill. Our results show a negative (positive) and significant relationship between the present value of tax bills and changes in the 10-year government bond yields (S &P 500 returns). The magnitude of this relationship increases over time, suggesting that market participants underreact at first and need a couple of days to digest the information contained in the tax bills. This delay can be explained by the textual characteristics of the bills in the case of the 10-year yields as a lower readability partly counteracts the negative relationship for up to three days after the signing of a tax bill. In the case of the stock market, we find similar evidence, but only for a part of the readability measures employed in this paper.

在本文中，我们分析了税单的文本复杂性是否会影响金融市场。根据 Romer 确定的 1962 年至 2003 年期间 32 份税单的 Flesch-Kincaid 等级水平 (Am Econ Rev 100(3):763–801, 2010)，我们评估了税单文本复杂性与财务状况之间的关系。各地市场各个窗口都在签署法案。我们的结果显示，税单现值与 10 年期政府债券收益率（标准普尔 500 指数回报）的变化之间存在负（正）显着关系。这种关系的程度随着时间的推移而增加，这表明市场参与者一开始反应不足，需要几天的时间来消化税单中包含的信息。这种延迟可以通过 10 年期收益率法案的文本特征来解释，因为较低的可读性部分抵消了税收法案签署后最多三天的负面关系。在股票市场的例子中，我们发现了类似的证据，但仅适用于本文采用的部分可读性措施。