Making sense in the financial discourse: If finance is everywhere, is it also for everyone?

The study of financial narratives is a relatively new field of research. Scholars have been investigating different types of financial narratives and studies are quite diverse, and they cover a wide range of textual data in terms of quantity and quality of information. However, the literature reveals a gap concerning the academic narrative in finance. Some scholars argue that finance research has little if no impact on the real-world economy due to the “growing” gap between academia and practitioners. In this thesis, I try to fill this gap by focusing on scientific narratives. This study consists of three chapters each representing a step forward in the investigation of the scientific material. The first chapter consists of a qualitative literature review that explores the concept of sensemaking and identifies major narrative theories in the literature. Scientific literature is commonly meant to make research results available to the scientific community, but also, eventually, to the general public and Finance makes no exception. However scientific papers tend to be written in formal and technical language that makes them less intelligible than they should be, complicating the possibility to make sense of them and to drive action in the financial environment for the great majority of individuals. This paper tackles the problem by defining and studying readability in financial academic papers, by the means of the three most widely accepted indexes. The results show, perhaps not surprisingly, that academic articles are very difficult to read, and such difficulty has increased over time. On the other hand, finance is characterized by a wide range of subfields and research areas, pre-established and emerging, that seem to be difficult to track. The third chapter of this thesis aims to define a structured topography for those who are seeking to navigate the body of knowledge in their extrapolation of finance phenomena. To make sense of it, a probabilistic topic modeling approach is applied to 6,000 abstracts of academic articles published in three top journals in finance between 1974 and 2021. To sum it up, the contribution of this work is first analyzing the interdependency between the process of sensemaking and decision-making in a narrative context. The second is highlighting the importance of scientific narratives in finance and measuring their understandability compared to finance-related texts. The results suggest that academia is producing “unreadable” texts that require some adaptation channels to fulfill the third mission of universities. The third contribution is related to the debates in the financial literature and the ways they can be better organized and classified and even updated to become more accessible and easier to navigate.