Determinants of Voluntary Disclosures in Overview of Operations - Korean Evidence

Abstract

This study examines the economic determinants of voluntary disclosures in the Overview of Operations section of the published annual report. The overview disclosures in Korea provide a unique setting for testing the economic motives of voluntary disclosures because there are no explicit regulations for the overview contents and format in Korea. We measure the level of voluntary disclosures by the number of words and the frequency of value-related keywords in an overview disclosure. We find that the levels of overview disclosure are positively associated with the degree of external financing, industry concentration, firm size, ownership of minority investors, and top managements involvement in the overview disclosures. Meanwhile, we find no consistent association between the level of overview disclosure and firm performance, ownership of largest/institutional/ foreign shareholders, return volatility, return-earnings correlation, and leverage. We find less significant associations when we use change variables instead of level variables or when we control for industry membership. Our results suggest that managers use the overview of operations as an information medium to communicate value-related information to the stakeholders even in the absence of mandatory requirements for the narrative disclosures.