（2005）Firm-specific determinants of continuous corporate disclosures（Discussion）.pdfVIP

The International Journal of Accounting 40 (2005) 279– 283 Discussion Discussion of bFirm specific determinants of continuous corporate disclosureQ Marleen Willekens Katholieke Universiteit Leuven In this paper Debreceny and Rahman (2005) investigate whether continuous disclosure is associated with the same variables as voluntary disclosure and disclosure frequency in particular. To that end nine hypotheses of continuous disclosure are formulated and tested. Frequency and regularity of online disclosures on stock exchange websites in eight developed markets in Asia and Europe are examined. Sample firms included in the analysis are 334 Morgan Stanley small-cap firms from eight different countries. A continuous disclosure model is proposed and the dependent variable is a self-constructed disclosure variable aggregated from manually collected Internet disclosures on stock exchange websites. The types of information disclosures included vary widely and some disclosures are mandatory whilst others are not. The explanatory variables of the proposed continuous disclosure model include measures of information asymmetry, agency costs, proprietary cost, operating cycle, performance, analyst following, free float, industry, US listing and country. The inclusion of these variables in the model is motivated by referring to the literature on voluntary disclosure. For the full sample (eight countries together), significant positive associations are found of the various continuous disclosure sub- measures with information asymmetry measures and country variables. Depending on the type of discl