Corporate Reporting of Intellectual Capital: Evidence from UK Companies
Presented to the 30th Annual Congress of the European Accounting Association, 25-27 April 2007, Lisbon, Portugal
31 Pages Posted: 16 Mar 2009
Date Written: April 25, 2007
Abstract
This paper reports the results of an empirical investigation into the intellectual capital reporting (ICR) practices of UK companies in four distinct sectors. It differs from prior ICR studies in that it analyses a wide range of external corporate reporting media for their IC content. It finds major differences between the intellectual capital elements reported in each sector studied, and finds an overall sector effect which is at variance with the expected overall sector effect. The study also finds that a range of corporate media were used for communicating intellectual capital information, and that the annual reports were not a good proxy for the proportion of disclosures across all corporate media.
Keywords: Intellectual capital reporting, UK companies, annual report, content analysis, sector effect, size effect
JEL Classification: M4, M40, M41, M49
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation