The labor unions impact on corporate disclosures’ topic shifting

Managers are choosing carefully which information to disclose as labor unions can take advantage of any information they have. Previous research has proven that managers may manipulate the tone of corporate disclosures in relation to union coverage. To go further, the aim of this paper is to study the possible existence of topic shifting in relation to the unionization rate. The first step is to retrieve the topics, using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation method and the second step is the use of a cross-sectional regression in order to capture the labor unions impact on topic shifting. The results show that it is obvious that unions have an impact on topics evoked in corporate disclosures.