Popular financial reporting increases understanding, interest, and trust: Experimental evidence
通过在线实验比较流行财务报告与传统财务报告，发现前者能显著提升公众对政府财务信息的理解、兴趣和信任，且对特定群体效果更强。
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.