Voluntary Disclosure Practices among Listed Companies in Nigeria Essay

Voluntary Disclosure Practices among Listed Companies in Nigeria
Adelopo, A. (2010). Voluntary Disclosure Practices Among Listed Companies in Nigeria. Advances in Accounting, Forthcoming. Retrieved from http//papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1533445
This critical research paper reveals voluntary disclosure practices among listed corporations in Nigeria. The paper used univariate and multivariate analysis and took a sample of 52 listed companies which was 42% of the total public listed companies. This research evaluated that 44% average voluntary disclosure was provided by the 52 listed companies in Nigeria. This 44% was ascertained from the disclosure index which comprised of 24 disclosure items.
The research paper evaluated that significant positive relationship between voluntary disclosure and firm size exist which was measured as the natural logarithm of total assets. Substantial positive relationship was also found between market based definition of firm performance level and voluntary disclosure. Percentage of block share ownership and percentage of managerial share ownership were found to be negatively correlated to firm disclosures. This study has a global implication and not just contextualized to only Nigerian economy and it is suitable for both individual and institutional investors. It also sends a lot of messages to the regulatory bodies and suggests what they need to adhere to in order to enhance the level of voluntary disclosures in the annual reports of listed corporations in their own arena. This study also has a lot of implications and lessons for policy makers to take heed of. It suggests the policy measures the policy makers should implement in order to enhance and improve the disclosure of voluntary information in listed company annual reports. The findings of this research paper should be interpreted with a number of caveats. One of the limitation was that the sample size was not more than 50%. The major reason for this limitation was that there was unavailability of information especially when you are concerned with a developing country such as Nigeria.
In the research methodology, this paper utilized univariate and multivariate model, regression model and disclosure index. These strategies were effective in assessing the Nigerian scenario.
Relevance to my Topic
This paper is relevant to my topic because its sample population is taken from a stock market and similarly my sample population will be taken from a stock market. This paper critically evaluated the results after studies of the annual reports and similarly my research will be based on the same technique where I plan to get the annual reports from the South Pacific Stock Exchange and evaluate the level of voluntary disclosure by listed companies. I will assess disclosure level through the disclosure index. My study will be different from this paper in that my study will concentrate on majority of the listed corporations on South Pacific Stock Exchange because there are only 16 prominently listed corporations as of today. Choosing majority firms will make my reasoning and findings very strong and decision makers can utilize my paper to make decisions in the context of a developing country like Fiji but not only limited to Fiji.