A cost benefit study of voluntary disclosure: some empirical evidence from French listed companies

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to relate the extent of disclosure in the annual reports of French listed companies to some economic determinants. The sample includes the 1995 annual reports of 102 randomly selected industrial and commercial firms. The extent of disclosure is measured by an index based on financial and non-financial discretionary information. The model of hypothesis explaining voluntary disclosure is defined as the interplay of contradictory forces: inducements deriving principally from agency theory and limitations imposed by information costs. The results reveal that voluntary disclosure is significantly related to size, foreign activity and to a proxy for proprietary costs.

Discretionary-based disclosure: evidence from the Brazilian market

“…This is due to risk that the money borrowed by the company might be transferred to shareholders. According to Depoers (2000), the larger the proportion of debt in the company"s capital structure, the higher the agency costs, and consequently more possibilities of wealth transfer from creditors to investors. In this sense, Agency Theory states that firms with higher levels of financial leverage tend to voluntary disclose more information in order to satisfy creditors and remove the suspicions of wealth transfer to shareholders (Jensen & Meckling, 1976).…”

“…Prior works on the determinants of voluntary disclosure have been conducted in several countries: France (Depoers, 2000); Hong Kong (Wallace & Naser, 1995), Japan (Cooke, 1992), Malaysia (Hossain, Tan, & Adams, 1994), the Czech Republic (Patton & Zelenka, 1997), Sweden (Cooke, 1989) and Switzerland (Raffounier, 1995).…”

Trends and determinants of corporate non-financial disclosure in Greece

“…Internationalization is operationalized by the percentage of sales exported to other countries (Chapple and Moon, 2005;Choi, 1999;Depoers, 2000) as well as by the number of countries, besides Greece, where the organization operates (Chapple and Moon, 2005).…”

Determinants of different accounting methods choice in Tanzania

“…The few studies that examine the effect of labour pressures on the process of making accounting decisions consider the level of unionization as a good indicator of employees' power of negotiation (Cullinan & Knoblett, 1994;Liberty & Zimmerman, 1986). Since this information may not be available for Tanzania corporations, we use, as in Depoers (2000), the ratio of salaries plus social charges to sales as a proxy of labour force power.…”