Study of Relationship between Corporate Web Disclosure and selected Company Characteristics

Abstract

The paper deals with analyzing the relationship of web disclosure with select company characteristics namely, profitability, public ownership and firm’s size. Fifty companies from five different industry sectors - Automobile, Information Technology, Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), Capital Goods and Banking are selected. Their web disclosure scores are calculated by using a checklist of disclosure consisting of twenty five items of information disclosed on the websites. These items belong to three important areas of web disclosures namely, Corporate Information, Financial & Stock Information and Management Information. Multiple regression is used to predict the dependent variable i.e. web disclosure score from the independent variables – profitability, percentage of public ownership and firms size. The multiple regression result shows that ‘Profitability’ and ‘Size’ positively affects the extent of web-based disclosure while Public Ownership does not affect it significantly. Keywords - Web Disclosure, Non-financial Attributes, Multiple Regression and Company Website.

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