A Survey on Voluntary Disclosure on the Internet. Empirical Evidence from 300 European Union Companies1

Nowadays, the Internet is a powerful means for companies to voluntarily discloseall kind of financial information. A wide academic literature exists on the field. Findingsreveal that the financial information disclosed is wider than that normally required byaccounting regulations. Furthermore, the disclosure on the Internet of compulsory informationcan be considered as a voluntary reporting practice in itself. In this paper, the informationcurrently provided on the Internet by leading companies in different European countries isanalyzed in order to make a comparative analysis. To achieve this goal, data from the biggest(market value) 20 companies in each European Union country have been collected. Then,statistical tests have been performed to determine the relationships between what we havecalled companies’ transparency (dependent variable) and their sector, country of origin andsize (independent variables). The results suggest that there is a statistically significantrelationship between these three variables and the extent of voluntary disclosure (transparency)on the Internet.