Voluntary disclosure reduces agency conflicts: An empirical analysis of Italian listed companies with substantial intangible assets

Abstract

R&D assets cause information asymmetries between shareholders and managers. In order to reduce such information asymmetries, our aim is to learn what typologies of additional information managers find it opportune to disclosure voluntarily in annual reports. We consider voluntary information which can be disclosed about strategy as well as that about R&D assets. Our analysis, which is conducted on a panel of 195 observations, shows that information about R&D is more useful to investors than information about strategy, but companies obtain greater benefits from providing information about strategy because they are more useful to other important stakeholders, such as lenders, bondholders, suppliers and others. For firms whose value is largely composed of assets such as R&D, management faces higher future uncertainty in transforming firm assets into revenues. This increases the utility for investors and other stakeholders of knowing the strategy management intends to anticipate and deal with eventual changes in the environment.