Institutional Environment, Ownership, and Disclosure of Intangibles: Evidence from East Asia

This paper examines the value relevance of voluntary disclosures about intangibles in eight East Asian countries, and the effect of variation in company-level and country-level governance on the valuation of these disclosures. Using Easton and Sommers' (2003) deflated valuation approach in analyses involving 459 companies, we find that the voluntary disclosures are value relevant, over and above the numbers in the balance sheet and income statement. We also find that the value relevance of these disclosures is conditional on the level of director ownership and the strength of the institutional features of a country.