Popular financial reporting increases understanding, interest, and trust: Experimental evidence

Jinhai Yu; Nick Petrovsky; Zhiwei Zhang; Josephine Gatti Schafer

doi:10.1080/10967494.2025.2496807

Popular financial reporting increases understanding, interest, and trust: Experimental evidence

Jinhai Yu^*
, Nick Petrovsky
, Zhiwei Zhang
, Josephine Gatti Schafer

^*Corresponding author for this work

Department of Public and International Affairs

Research output: Journal Publications and Reviews › RGC 21 - Publication in refereed journal › peer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

How can governments best report information to the public to enhance transparency and accountability? We address this question in the context of government financial reporting. Traditional financial reporting is widely considered technical and inaccessible to the public. In contrast, popular financial reporting is viewed as an accessible solution. As a result, we expect popular financial reporting to increase three outcomes relative to traditional financial reporting: recipients’ understanding, interest, and trust in government financial information. We conduct a pre-registered online survey experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk using Cloud Research to compare subject responses to a Popular Annual Financial Report (a user-friendly format) and an Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (a traditional, technical format). The Popular Annual Financial Report causes an increase in understanding, interest, and trust in government financial information. The effects on interest and trust are larger for those who felt more informed about government budgets, voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and were more educated. © 2025 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1-28
Journal	International Public Management Journal
Volume	29
Issue number	1
Online published	2 Jun 2025
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/10967494.2025.2496807
Publication status	Published - 2026

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Full text of this publication does not contain sufficient affiliation information. With consent from the author(s) concerned, the Research Unit(s) information for this record is based on the existing academic department affiliation of the author(s)

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SDG 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

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AU - Schafer, Josephine Gatti

N1 - Full text of this publication does not contain sufficient affiliation information. With consent from the author(s) concerned, the Research Unit(s) information for this record is based on the existing academic department affiliation of the author(s)

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AB - How can governments best report information to the public to enhance transparency and accountability? We address this question in the context of government financial reporting. Traditional financial reporting is widely considered technical and inaccessible to the public. In contrast, popular financial reporting is viewed as an accessible solution. As a result, we expect popular financial reporting to increase three outcomes relative to traditional financial reporting: recipients’ understanding, interest, and trust in government financial information. We conduct a pre-registered online survey experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk using Cloud Research to compare subject responses to a Popular Annual Financial Report (a user-friendly format) and an Annual Comprehensive Financial Report (a traditional, technical format). The Popular Annual Financial Report causes an increase in understanding, interest, and trust in government financial information. The effects on interest and trust are larger for those who felt more informed about government budgets, voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and were more educated. © 2025 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

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Popular financial reporting increases understanding, interest, and trust: Experimental evidence

Abstract

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