Table 3 , Panel A shows that the presence of jargon negatively affects disclosure-understanding (Link 1a; coefficient = −1.499, p < 0.01, one-tailed), which in turn leads to lower investment willingness (Link 2a; coefficient = 0.348, p < 0.01, one-tailed). In addition, the direct link between the presence of jargon and investment willingness is not significant (Link 3a; coefficient = −0.374, p = 0.39), indicating that disclosure-understanding fully explains the effect of jargon on investment willingness (i.e., a full mediation). Table 3 , Panel B presents the indirect effect of the presence of jargon on investment willingness through disclosure-understanding. We find that the 90% bootstrapped confidence interval ( −0.958, −0.233) does not contain zero, suggesting that the indirect effect of jargon is significant at the (one-tailed) 5% level of significance. 12 Overall, the mediation results support our argument that for investors without industry knowledge, jargon reduces their investment willingness because it decreases their understanding of management disclosures.