In attempting to understand voluntary corporate disclosure, many empirical studies have used leverage as an explanatory variable. One reason for an association between debt and disclosure relates to the agency costs of the shareholder-bondholder conflict. By voluntarily disclosing information, shareholders may be able to reduce this agency cost. We provide an additional reason why debt and disc...

Competition creates strategic incentives for firms to communicate private information about product quality through signalling rather than voluntary disclosure. In a duopoly where firms may disclose quality before setting prices and prices may signal quality, non-disclosure by all firms may often be the unique symmetric outcome even if disclosure cost vanishes. A high-quality firm may not discl...

Proactive security activities encompass voluntary disclosure concerning information security that firms are taking to improve the security of their information and information systems. Examples of voluntary disclosures falling into this category include discussions about a firm’s use of encryption, secure socket layers data transmission, implementation of network security measures, or disclosur...

I examine Health Maintenance Organizations' (HMOs) voluntary disclosure of product quality, which is not as complete as unraveling theories predict. After controlling for cost and demand factors, I find that HMOs use voluntary disclosure to differentiate from competitors, with lower disclosure rates in highly competitive markets. These findings are consistent with product differentiation, but c...

We examine the voluntary disclosure policy of a ®rm where the manager has private information and opportunities to trade on it. The equilibrium disclosure policy ranges from full disclosure to partial disclosure to nondisclosure depending on whether the manager's pay±performance sensitivity is high, medium or low, respectively. In the partial disclosure equilibrium, good news is more likely to ...

Purpose: This paper empirically investigates the factors that impact voluntary information disclosure level of Turkish manufacturing companies listed in the Borsa Istanbul (BIST). Design/methodology/approach: The data collection methodology of the study is content analysis of annual reports of the corporations listed on the BIST for the year 2010. In order to analyze the results, we employed Or...

In a society depending on real time information, corporate disclosure is crucial for the capital market efficiency. The more disclosures a company makes, the more transparent becomes the information to investors, the lower becomes the information asymmetry and more credible the firms will be for the market. The purpose of this study is to investigate the association between the voluntary disclo...

We hypothesize that this variation in the extent and nature of financial data disseminated through corporate Web sites is associated with the factors that influence the initial disclosure of financial information. We consider information items that contain required disclosures separately from those that contain mainly voluntary disclosures, since most previous work that identifies factors affec...

Single-segment (focused) firms have a natural disadvantage compared to multi-segment (diversified) with respect to voluntary disclosure policy. Since aggregate disclosures by focused firms are at a finer level of detail than those of diversified firms, the latter have greater ability to react to focused firm information and therefore have a competitive advantage. I provide evidence that focused...