In the current scenario of financial reporting regime, investors are increasingly looking at the disclosure practices of companies. The companies also face capital market pressures and need to disclose more than the regulatory norms. There could be several motivations for the companies to disclose more information voluntarily. This article explores the factors that determine the voluntary disclosure choices of the non-financial companies listed in the National Stock Exchange (NSE). The study uses a voluntary disclosure index (VDI) constructed by the authors with 81 financial and non-financial items across different categories such as strategy, forward looking, environment and social, etc. With the VDI, this study measures the voluntary disclosure levels for four financial years from 2009-2010 to 2012-2013 using the content analysis methodology. The study uses a panel data model to analyse the effects of three categories of variables, namely, firm characteristics, profitability and governance and found the fixed effect model to be suitable and leverage, size and institutional ownership emerged as the determinants of voluntary disclosures. The article is one of the first studies to use longitudinal data and a disclosure index specific to the Indian context.

This article investigates the effect of voluntary corporate disclosures on the firm value from the market value perspective. Financial reporting includes disclosures as prescribed by regulators, but few companies go beyond mandatory requirements and provide additional information voluntarily. This study empirically tests the extent of such voluntary disclosures using Corporate Voluntary Disclosure Index containing 81 items of both financial and non-financial information and panel data regression to test the hypotheses. The sample for this study is the non-financial companies in the BSE 100 Index and the period is five financial years from 2010–2011 to 2014–2015. This study finds a positive association between voluntary disclosures and firm value as measured by Tobin’s Q. Especially the market gives a higher valuation for companies disclosing optional information on social and environmental, corporate governance and financial information. This finding has a significant implication for emerging economies like India and it supports various disclosure theories such as agency, stakeholders and positive accounting theories.

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The development of DGs will bring new changes to traditional power systems. Distributed Generation has important consequences for the operation of the distribution networks. Appropriate size and location of Distributed Generation (DG) play a significant role in minimizing power losses in Distribution Systems. This paper represents techniques to minimize power losses and improves voltage stability in a distribution feeder by optimizing DG model in terms of size, location and operating point of DG through sensitivity analysis. The methods have been developed with considering load characteristics and representing loads with constant impedance and constant current models, separately. A DG injection into the Distribution System improves the voltage profile with minimum loss. The proposed techniques have been tested on IEEE 37 bus Distribution system and TNEB 11 KV Distribution feeder.

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