The Effect of Fundamental Determinants on Voluntary Disclosure of Financial and Nonfinancial Information: the Case of Tehran

The recent tendency of businesses toward voluntary disclosure has improved the quality of financial reporting. High-quality financial reporting helps users of financial information trust the business, and thus creates value for the business. Also, during the last decade there has been a profound revolution in information technology as a result of the Internet, and obviously accounting has been directly affected by this change. The present study divides voluntary disclosure into two groups of financial and non-financial information and investigates the effects of fundamentals on voluntary disclosure by businesses. The population is composed of 65 companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange from 2005 to 2012. The hypothesis testing results show that firm size, business complexity, earnings volatility, and firm value had a significant and positive impact on voluntary disclosure, whereas financial leverage had a significant and negative impact on voluntary disclosure, while no relationship was observed between voluntary disclosure and financial performance.