Date of Award

1-1-2003

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Edith Cowan University

Degree Name

Master of Business

School

School of Accounting

Faculty

Faculty of Business and Public Management

First Supervisor

Professor Colin Dolley

Abstract

The objective of the study is to examine firms characteristics associated with aggregate financial disclosure practices of listed Indian manufacturing and trading companies for the financial year 1999-2000. Eight research hypothesis were developed. It is hypothesised that firm size, size of the audit firm, leverage, multinational company influence, and capital increase will be positively associated with disclosure of financial information by Indian companies, while ownership diffusion, liquidity and profitability will have no association with disclosure of financial information by Indian companies. Two types of disclosure indexes (weighted and the unweighted index) were constructed for measuring disclosure. Weights were assigned to the index based on the perception of financial analysts. A multiple linear regression analysis was conducted on the sample of 55 Indian companies using two models (Model 1 for unweighted index and Model 2 for weighted index). It was found that disclosure is positively associated with firm size, ownership diffusion, profitability and marginally with capital increase. All the other variables were found to have no effect on disclosure. In this study it was expected that the use of weights would improve the explanatory power of the models. However, no differences were noted between the results from weighted and unweighted disclosure index. Both Model 1 and Model 2 had indicated similar results.

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