Does audit committee quality mediate determinants of intellectual capital disclosure?

Abstract

This study investigates the direct and indirect effects, mediated by audit committee quality, of managerial ownership, institutional ownership, and profitability on intellectual capital (IC) disclosure. The object observed of this study is companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) in the 2014-2018 period that are classified as high intellectual capital-intensive industries. Based on the sampling method, purposive sampling, 51 companies were selected as samples. This study used path analysis techniques with IBM SPSS version 25 to study the direct and indirect influences of managerial ownership, institutional ownership, and profitability toward IC disclosure. The results of this study show that managerial ownership, profitability and audit committee quality have a significant positive effect on IC disclosure whereas institutional ownership has significant negative effect on IC disclosure. This study also provides empirical evidence, supported by the sobel test, that the audit committee quality is able to mediate the effect of institutional ownership and profitability on IC disclosure. However, the audit committee quality is not able to mediate the effect of managerial ownership on IC disclosure. These findings develop and strengthen the results of prior studies related to the implementation of signaling theory and agency theory in devoting more understanding about IC disclosure.