Quality, readability, and narrative aspects of MD&A reports: Literature review and future research potential

This article provides significant insights on what has been done so far in the field of Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) and discuss the implications of MD&A disclosures for investors and financial analysts and future research potential in the respective area. Systematic Literature Review method is adopted for the MD&A studies as to categorize them into four different themes: An overview of MD&A structure; Quality of the MD&A disclosures & its forecast ability; Readability of MD&A reports and Narrative of MD&A disclosures. Also, future scope of the research is also discussed. It is found that the MD&A reports are really contributing in decision making of the shareholders and financial analysts in terms of predicting the future accounting results, earning per share, sales and explains going concern opinion according to existing researches, thus demanded to audit the MD&A reports as well to enhance the authenticity. Recent studies have included Artificial intelligence (AI) tool in their studies to provide more reliable results and more future researches can be done with the help of AI.