Corporate Website-based Measures of Firms' Value Drivers

By: Wei Cai, Dennis Campbell and Patrick Ferguson

Format:Electronic
| Language:English
| Pages:87

Abstract

We develop and validate new text-based measures of firms’ financial and non-financial value drivers. Using the Wayback Machine to access public US firms’ archived websites from 1995-2020, we scrape text from corporate homepages. We use Kaplan and Norton’s (1992) balanced scorecard, as well as Ittner and Larcker’s (2001) value-based management framework, to classify this text. We then construct at the yearly level standardized measures of firms’ financial and non-financial value drivers. We show that our measures vary over time in accordance with broad trends in the economy and changes in management practices. We show that our value driver measures vary both within and across industries, and we capture related yet distinct constructs that shed light on firm strategy. Finally, we validate our measures by documenting associations between firms’ value drivers and established accounting, financial, and non-financial measures. Our paper provides researchers with a means to construct value-driver measures for any firm that possesses or has possessed a website.

Keywords

Value; Corporate Strategy; Accounting; Analytics and Data Science

Citation

Cai, Wei, Dennis Campbell, and Patrick Ferguson. "Corporate Website-based Measures of Firms' Value Drivers." SSRN Working Paper Series, No. 4413808, April 2023.