This study examines factors influencing the voluntary disclosures of three types of information (strategic, nonfinancial, financial) contained in the annual reports of MNCs from the U.S., U.K. and Continental Europe. While company size, country/region, listing status, and, to a lesser extent, industry are the most important factors explaining voluntary disclosures overall, the importance of the factors varies by information type.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.jibs.8490186.pdf

Factors Influencing Voluntary Annual Report Disclosures By U.S., U.K. and Continental European Multinational Corporations

Purpose – The main thrust of this paper is to assess the level of disclosure in the annual reports of non‐financial Saudi firms and to empirically investigate the hypothesized impact of several firm characteristics on the extent of voluntary disclosure.Design/methodology/approach – A disclosure checklist consisting of 20 voluntary items was developed to assess the level of disclosure in the 2003 annual reports of 40 firms, forming approximately 56 percent of the total firms incorporated in Saudi Arabia. The association between the level of disclosure and some firm characteristics was examined using multiple linear regression analysis.Findings – The results show that the mean of the disclosure index was lower than average. Also, it was found that firm size was significantly positively associated with the level of disclosure. The remaining variables, however, were found to be insignificant in explaining the variation of voluntary disclosure.Research limitations/implications – There are, however, several lim...

The association between firm‐specific characteristics and disclosure

Voluntary disclosure in the annual reports of an emerging country: The case of Qatar

Annual reports are an important element in the genre of corporate public discourse. The reporting practices mandated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for all publicly traded corporations are intended to render the annual reports a legitimate and trustworthy medium through which management communicates information related to the financial performance of the firm. The following discussion represents an inaugural attempt to investigate the ethical characteristics of the discourse found in corporate annual reports using Habermas' principles of communicative action. In preparing the Management's Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) portion of the report, managers are charged with providing narrative information for investors and other interested third parties relevant to assessing the firm's financial condition. Previous rhetorical studies of the narrative portions of annual reports argue that they serve as means for both legitimate and distorted communication. We investigate this communication medium through the lens of Habermas' norms for communicative action, which require communicators to be comprehensible, truthful, sincere, and legitimate. The study represents an initial attempt to operationalization Habermas' principles of communicative action and to employ a methodology that facilitates their application to research within a business context. From one perspective, consistent with agency theory as specified by neoclassical economics, it would seem that firms anticipating worse-than-expected financial performance would be less likely to exhibit the Habermasian principles necessary for undistorted communication because they would attempt to strategically influence the message being communicated about the firm's financial position. Instead, employing rhetorical analysis software, Diction 5.0, we found that firms expecting both good and bad earnings surprises exhibited a higher level of communicative action than a composite average firm. Although preliminary in nature, our findings suggest that firms anticipating large earnings surprises, either high or low, use the narrative portion of the annual report as a vehicle through which to communicate information about managements' veracity and trustworthiness as well as the firm's financial position.

Communicative Action and Corporate Annual Reports

International Capital Market Pressures and Voluntary Annual Report Disclosures by U.S. and U.K. Multinationals

This article reports on a major study which is part of ongoing international research into the use and usefulness of financial statements for investment decisions. The survey reported covered 4,000 individual investors, 900 institutional investors and 900 financial analysts, in 3 countries. It was found that the 3 groups in all 3 countries revealed a strong belief in the importance of financial statements for investment decisions whether “buy” or “hold/sell.” It was also found that the individual investor group was far less homogeneous than previous research has assumed, and that cultural or social differences between countries do exist in this field.

The Utility of Annual Reports: An International Study

The perceived usefulness of financial statements for investors' decisions

Although the utility of corporate published forecasted financial reports to investors has been investigated, the findings are inconclusive. These inconclusive findings may have resulted from the ambiguity of defining the forecasted financial reports or its components. The clarification of the definition of forecasted financial reports or its components is the main objective of the present study. In addition, an investor's utility function is used to measure the utility of such reports for investors regarding the entire forecasted financial reports or their components.

The construction of an international investors' perception model for corporate published forecasted financial reports for the USA, the UK and New Zealand

Lucia S. Chang

Papers

The Utility of Annual Reports: An International Study

The perceived usefulness of financial statements for investors' decisions

The construction of an international investors' perception model for corporate published forecasted financial reports for the USA, the UK and New Zealand