Proceedings

The full specification of the regression is:
Disclosure Index Scores = β + β Size + β Leverage + β Age + β ROE + β Liquidity +
β Innovativeness
+ β Auditor + ε
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Size = Log of the book value of total assets (in millions of U.S. $)
Leverage = Leverage ratio (total liabilities divided by total assets)
Age = Log of the age of firm (in years)
ROA = net income divided by the average of the last two year’s total
assets
Liquidity = current assets divided by current liabilities
Innovativeness = research & development expenditures divided by net sales
Auditor type = Big 4 audit firm = 1 and non-Big 4 audit firm = 0
β = Slopes of the independent variables while β 0 is a constant or
the value of Y when X values are zero.
ε = The error term, normally distributed about a mean of 0.
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5. ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION OF RESULTS
5.1. Descriptive Results
Table 4 presents the descriptive statistics for the dependent and independent variables.
There is a wide range of variation within the disclosure indexes as indicated by the
minimum and maximum values. The disclosure index over all 54 items vary between
sample firms and range from 3.7% to 77.8%. The mean of the overall index is 15.1%.
The low amount of items disclosed in the last year of the VFP could be explained on
the basis that XBRL is still a relatively new technology in business reporting. Thus,
the preparations of XBRL documents are based on very limited guidance and
experience. As assumed, within the information subgroups the mean of the index of
financial information is the highest (14.95%), followed by the subgroups nonfinancial
information (11.57%) and general information (2.5%). Table 4 also shows
the considerable variation in the independent variables, which reflects the diversity of
voluntary filers in XBRL. For example, the youngest firm that files in XBRL format
is three years old. In contrast, the oldest firm is 206 years old. 14 firms in my sample
had R&D activities. The maximum value of the innovativeness level is 24.9%. Not
surprisingly, the majority of voluntary filers use Big 4 firms for their annual audits.
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