While characteristics of quantitative accounting data have received substantial attention in the academic literature, much less is known about the accompanying text. We document marked trends in 10-K disclosure over the period 1996-2013, with increases in length, boilerplate, stickiness, and redundancy and decreases in specificity, readability, and the relative amount of hard information. We use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to examine specific topics and find that new FASB and SEC requirements explain most of the increase in length and that 3 of the 150 topics-fair value, internal controls, and risk factor disclosures-account for virtually all of the increase. These three disclosures also play a major role in explaining the trends in the remaining textual characteristics. Our results are potentially relevant to regulators in understanding trends in, and topical sources of textual characteristics amid concerns about increasingly onerous accounting disclosures.

SUMMARY We investigate whether auditors are sensitive to litigation risk related specifically to having greater numbers of institutional investors that hold the common stock of a given client. Our findings suggest that audit fees are higher when the number of institutional investors holding stock in the company is greater. Additional tests corroborate our inference that the association between audit fees and the number of institutional investors is related to litigation risk. The importance of improving our understanding of auditors' sensitivity to factors that increase litigation exposure is highlighted by the number and magnitude of lawsuits filed against auditors relating to the audits of public clients.

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