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The purpose of this paper is to investigate intangible disclosure quality (IDQ) in an international sample of 29 stock‐quoted telecommunications network operators (TNOs). IDQ is captured separately for annual reports and websites of TNOs using a set of seven intangible asset categories. The article also explores associations between annual report and website IDQ on the one hand and variables interpreted either as IDQ antecedents (e.g. firm size) or as IDQ performance consequences (e.g. market‐to‐book ratio) on the other.

TNOs' 2003 or 2003/2004 annual reports and TNOs' websites (as of May 2005) were subjected to content analytical procedures in order to quantify sample firms' disclosure quality levels for seven categories of intangible assets derived from a framework suggested by the Deutsche Schmalenbach Gesellschaft für Betriebswirtschaft eV.

Both annual report and website IDQ levels of TNOs were relatively low. Intangible disclosures were often limited to small pieces of qualitative information. Annual report and website IDQ are significantly positively interrelated. IDQ varies significantly by the home region of the TNO, with European TNOs displaying higher quality levels than their American counterparts. IDQ measures were not significantly related to TNOs' financial performance criteria.

Research limitations result from the study's single industry focus, small sample size and the limited range of variables investigated as potential IDQ antecedents/consequences.

TNOs get insights on IDQ within their industry. Regulators/standard setting accounting institutions are encouraged to encounter industry‐specific intangible characteristics by industry‐focused intangible measurement rules in addition to an overall intangible reporting framework.

This study is the first investigation that simultaneously analyzes IDQ both in a firm's annual report and on its website. Further, it is unique in its use of uni‐ and multivariate analytical techniques exploring IDQ antecedents/consequences and in its single industry/TNO focus.

This paper aims to study the relationship between intellectual capital disclosures (ICDs) and the relative importance of intangible assets as company value drivers.

Annual reports of Swedish, British and Danish firms are analysed to measure the extent of ICD. The level of intellectual capital (IC) in firms, measured with proxies for the categories of human, structural and relational capital.

As to the components of IC, the empirical results indicate that there is a strong significant positive relationship between (the level of) structural capital possession of a firm and the firm's ICD.

This suggests that firms with a relatively high level of structural capital, disclose more information on IC in the annual report. The study found no such significant association between human and relational capital in firms and ICD regarding these items. Firms might have a transparency drawback in addressing these issues in the reports when these IC categories are relatively of greater importance for firms.

The paper provides evidence for the argument that firms focus their ICD on those IC elements that are most relevant for the company's value creation process.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the drivers for voluntary intellectual capital (IC) reporting based on agency theory. This study responds to calls for critical investigations of IC reporting utilising Goebel’s (2015a) IC measuring approach to investigate the role of IC value and mispricing for IC reporting.

A mandatory management report offers a unique research setting in Germany. The content analysis results of 428 German management reports are used in a regression analysis with leverage, ownership diffusion, IC value and mispricing. Additionally, a propensity score matching approach examines the relationship between IC reporting and IC value.

The regression results show that companies use voluntary IC reporting to encounter mispricing. IC reporting is negatively associated with leverage, whereas ownership diffusion and IC value show no significant results. The propensity score matching approach is also not significant.

This study contributes to strengthening and testing agency theory for IC reporting. As mispricing is identified to play an important role for IC reporting, IC research should account for mispricing.

The findings suggest to reopen a discussion on the declared aims of the German management report and the international integrated reporting model to provide information on value creation, as IC value shows no link to IC reporting.

This study innovatively links IC reporting to IC value and mispricing to investigate drivers for voluntary IC reporting.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse annual reports as media of intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) by Portuguese listed companies and to evaluate size, industry and time effects on disclosure as well as the effects of ICD on the growth of a company.

The paper examines ICD in 2004, 2006 and 2008 annual reports using content analysis. Non‐parametric statistical methods are used to test size and industry effects on disclosure, the effects of the level of disclosure on the growth of a company and to determine the significance of the differences in disclosure between the years under analysis.

The analysis showed that size is significant in explaining ICD. The results also indicated that industrial affiliation is only partially a factor explaining ICD. It was not possible to confirm neither an increase in ICD over time, nor the relationship between ICD and growth.

The sample is small. There may be content analysis issues associated with subjectivity in the coding process and the use of a limited content analysis method.

This paper adds to the scarce research on ICD by Portuguese companies by providing new empirical data.

Because no international accounting policy exists to mandate human capital (HC) information must be reported on financial reports, the association between workforce HC and firm performance/efficiency is not well-established. South Korea is a rare example with high HC reporting quality, as well as relatively high national productivity. On the other hand, in some developed countries (such as the UK), HC reporting quality and productivity is low. Moreover, there is an increasing propensity to offer employees non-standard contracts. Thus, because of a divergence in HC reporting quality internationally, the South Korean sample can provide valuable insights to countries with weak HC reporting quality about the association between contract quality and firm performance/efficiency.

Using a sample of Korean listed firms (2010–2015), pooled Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression analysis is conducted to show whether firms that offer employees higher levels of permanent, relative to temporary contacts, demonstrate higher firm performance/efficiency.

Firms that provide employees with increasing permanent (temporary) contracts experience higher (lower) performance/efficiency.

This research is limited due to sample selection. However, the sample represents the population of all firms that report contract type information in South Korea, a market with highly robust HC information reporting.

Because of data unavailability, a positive association firm-level performance/efficiency and permanent employment can only be made in a handful of countries. The study has policy implications and extends the non-financial reporting literature by addressing HC reporting limitations that exist in the mainstream accounting framework. Based on relative operational efficiency/performance, the study offers practical insights to management about the importance of staff retainment. Moreover, the authors also offer an anthropocentric perspective by inferring how low HC reporting quality can have a negative impact on society in Industry 4.0.

This paper aims at exploring the extent and determinants of intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) in India.

Content of annual reports of 200 firms classified on their market capitalization is analysed using search terms to find out the extent and nature of disclosure. The period of study is 2010-11 and 2013-14. Paired t-test is used to see if there is any significant change in the level of disclosure between two time periods. The various determinants and their impacts are captured using a regression equation.

The analysis showed evidence that market capitalization, ownership and age of the firms are the major determinants of ICD in India. Performance, size and type of industry mattered only for large-cap firms. Disclosure levels are seen to increase with market capitalization. Human capital and external capital is highly reported by all categories of firms. The overall disclosure by all categories has significantly increased, whereas that of human capital and external capital has increased significantly only in small-cap and mid-cap firms.

This paper looks at size, market and performance-related variables and their impact on the extent of disclosure. It takes representative firms from three indices based on their market capitalization and evaluates them, thus making results and findings reliable. This is the first paper which takes a large cross section sample from across 12 sectors and also performs a longitudinal analysis. This paper is of interest to managers of firms who can affect the policies of their firms in making robust changes in disclosure practices.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the management teams' views regarding different aspects related to the disclosure of non‐financial information in the annual report. The focus is on the following aspects: incentive, quantity, focus, use of non‐financial key performance indicators (KPIs) and trends.

The data are based on a comprehensive questionnaire survey addressed to investor‐relation managers (IRMs) at the largest companies listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange.

The study confirms an increasing focus of non‐financial information related to intangible assets in corporate disclosure. This increase appears to be both regulatory and demand driven. Encouraging indeed is that management teams seem to have acknowledged the importance not only to describe the less tangible values per se, but also to explain the roles they play in the value‐creation process and in corporate strategy. Furthermore, the study reveals a trend shift from research and development (R&D) and relational information towards corporate social responsibility (CSR) and employee‐related information, an increasing number of non‐financial KPIs and a positive attitude to mandatory requirements. Overall, the findings indicate that voluntary disclosure compensates for the deficiencies of financial statements to properly disclose intangible assets. This may lessen the risk of the argued impairment of the efficient allocation of resources on the stock market.

The findings reveal that quite a few challenges lie ahead in shaping efficient corporate disclosures where also intangible assets are in focus. The most critically relate to dealing with the concerns of reliability and comparability associated with disclosures of intangible assets and their related non‐financial KPIs. This needs to be taken on promptly by management teams, policy makers and financial market regulators if the corporate‐disclosure process shall function efficiently and facilitate decreased information asymmetry and uphold an efficient allocation of resources on the stock market.

Herein not only one aspect related to disclosure of non‐financial information is being analysed, but also several and from a management‐team perspective, which is a perspective often neglected for the sophisticated‐user perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the intellectual capital reporting (ICR) practices of listed non‐financial companies in Bangladesh as an example of a South Asian developing country, and to empirically investigate some company characteristics as determinants of such practices.

This is an empirical study of ICR by 90 listed companies in Bangladesh in 2008‐2009 using content analysis of annual reports. The study uses a weighted disclosure index and ordinary least squares regression analyses to test the association between company characteristics and the extent of ICR.

The study finds that despite the stock market growing significantly during the recession period, there is a tendency of companies not to disclose IC. The study also confirms that size and industry are important attributes to explain the IC disclosure (ICD) issues in Bangladesh. Unlike prior studies, the study finds that the IT sector does not tend to disclose more extensively, and that companies currently fail to disclose many important items such as patents, trademark and copyrights. The result is an indication that companies in Bangladesh are reluctant to disclose IC. The study is also similar to Abeysekera and Guthrie, who found that Sri Lanka is a proactive rather reactive country in terms of ICR. The study also finds ICR depends on the self‐interests of the company.

The scope of this study is limited to single year, 2008‐2009. It would be interesting to replicate this study in other developing countries or a group of developing countries in South Asia that have many similarities to the Bangladesh socio‐economic environment. Nevertheless, the study incorporates the current level of ICR transparency in Bangladesh.

Unlike previous studies, the present study is based on a developing country where the capital market is growing significantly during the recession years. The study also develops a weighted disclosure index in a developing country context, based on the extensive literature of ICD and some new characteristics, namely non‐family ownership, audit committee and liquidity risk.

Intellectual capital (IC) is believed to be more important resources to add the value of a company rather than physical assets. This gives rise to the increasing practice of reporting IC information in corporate annual report. Over the past fifteen years, considerable numbers of studies have employed content analysis to examine the extent and nature of IC information in several countries, but they presented different results. These results might partly contribute to different methods in counting information. In fact, the previous studies have been critised for not explicitly clarifying how information was recoded and counted which led to incomparable findings. Therefore, this paper firstly seeks to discuss an illustrative example of ‘sense-making‘ process in identifying, categorizing, and counting of IC information in annual reports of pilot sample company. Secondly, the method refined in the pilot study was applied over the final samples of six large companies in the UK from 1974 to 2008 The contribution of this paper is to primarily refine the previous method in recoding information, to send a message that transparency is crucial in content analysis and to facilitate method replication for future studies. Overall, this study demonstrates a marked increase in IC information disclosure was identified over the 35 years. The relational capital information disclosure was relatively more prominent over time, followed by human capital and structural capital.

Human capital is considered by many to be a firm's most important asset. However, because no international human capital reporting framework exists, firms can decide to include/exclude human capital details on annual reports. Based on legitimacy theory, firms that disclose high levels of human capital information can be considered congruent with the expectations of society. However, firms can also choose to include human capital information on annual reports for symbolic purposes as an image management strategy.

Using 2018 as a sample period, content analysis is used to evaluate the annual reports of the 25 largest British and 25 largest Korean firms to demonstrate the propensity of British/Korean firms to disclose human capital information as numerical and textual data.

The authors report that South Korean firms provide high levels of human capital information using narrative and numerical data, including value added human capital elements included on integrated reports. British firms on the other hand tend to use primarily positive narrative and limited numerical human capital data to present human capital information.

The results imply South Korean firms provide robust human capital information on annual reports as a legitimacy strategy. On the other hand, the UK's human capital reporting requirement can be considered as a form of image management. The results therefore have important policy implications for legislators, labour unions and firm stakeholders with incentives to enhance human capital information transparency.