VOLUNTARY DISCLOSURE OF HUMAN CAPITAL An Explorative Study of Voluntary Disclosure Practices in Swedish Annual Reports

Abstract

This thesis concerns the increasing importance and amount of voluntary disclosures. As intangible assets play an even more important role in companies’ value-creating process then ever before, it has become more important to communicate these “hidden” assets to external stakeholders. As the traditional financial accounting standards are insufficient to capture and communicate the value of intangibles, companies use voluntary disclosure to breach the knowledge and information gap between internal and external users of such information. In this thesis we have explored the voluntary disclosure practices in companies noted on the Stockholm stock exchange. The study is limited to human capital disclosure by examining what type of human resource information is presented in annual reports. The study also includes a multidimensional instrument, which is used to explore how the information included in the annual report is presented. Our explorative study on voluntary disclosure of human capital has shown that the disclosures among Swedish companies are not very extensive regarding what information is enclosed and how this information is presented. We also call out for some sort of standardization of the manner in which the information is presented.