Voluntary Disclosure in the Annual Reports of Commercial Banks

The issue of corporate reporting disclosure behaviour is influenced not only by environmental factors but also by corporate-specific attributes (e.g. firm age firm size profitability liquidity government ownership foreign ownership and listing status); this has attracted many academic researchers in several countries to investigate the impact of corporate attributes on the extent of different disclosure levels (i.e. mandatory voluntary or aggregate disclosure). To date less attention has been paid by academic researchers to voluntary disclosure practices by financial institutions in general and banking disclosure practices in particular despite the fact that the banking sector plays a major role in economic growth in a country. Moreover there is very little empirical evidence about the impact of commercial bank-specific characteristics on the extent of annual information voluntarily disclosed. Thus this book intended to help develop the disclosure literature in relation to the commercial banking sector which is currently sparse due to the limited empirical research on the extent of banking disclosure and its determinants.