Determinants of Intellectual Capital Disclosures (ICD): Evidence from Ghana

Abstract

This paper seeks to identify factors that influence the voluntary disclosure of Intellectual Capital (IC) in corporate annual reports of listed companies in Ghana. We examine the ICD of 25 listed companies on the Ghana Stock Exchange (GSE) over a five-year period (2006-2010) through content analysis of their corporate annual reports. The study employs a panel regression analysis to establish the relationship between ICD levels of firms and firm-specific characteristics. While company size and industry sector determine the level of ICD of companies in corporate annual reports, corporate profitability and age cannot be used to predict such ICD levels of companies. The study was limited to selected listed companies on the GSE before 2006; a basically small capital market in Ghana. The implication of this study is that financial performance and the number of years of existence by a company does not influence ICD levels while the size of a company and industrial sector in which a company operate do impact ICD levels among listed companies. This is a pioneering paper on evidence of determinants of ICDs of Ghanaian corporate firms, one of the first to investigate the determinants of ICD in annual reports in West Africa.