Textual Data on Financial Statement Notes

Background

We share textual data of the most prevalent financial statement notes in annual 10-K filings. The data includes the text of each financial statement note along with the count of words and numbers in each note. The data is available for fiscal years between 2011-2021. 

Accurately extracting financial statement notes from financial reports is a challenging task because companies tend to use different terminologies to describe footnotes. The XBRL mandate alleviates this challenge by requiring companies to tag each footnote in its entirety using, when available, standardized TextBlock tags. For example, the most common fair value TextBlock tag is ”us-gaap:FairValueDisclosuresTextBlock” which appears across 73% of firms that report fair value (Ahn et al. 2020).

For more details on the data, please refer to the “TextBlock data dictionary.docx” and the “TextBlock Categories.xlsx” files.  

Relevant papers that use XBRL TextBlocks:

If you decide to use the data, please consider citing at least one of the following papers. These papers explain and/or use XBRL TextBlock tags:

Ahn, J., R. Hoitash, and U. Hoitash. 2020. Auditor Task-Specific Expertise: The Case of Fair Value Accounting. The Accounting Review, May 2020, Vol. 95, No. 3, pp. 1-32.

Hoitash, R., U. Hoitash, and L. Morris. 2021. eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL): A Review and Implications for Future Research. Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory 40(2):107-132.

Burke, J.J., Hoitash, R., Hoitash, U. and Xiao, S.X., 2022. The Disclosure and Consequences of U.S. Critical Audit Matters.

Below we provide links to footnote text data and several related documents