The correlation between volatility and voluntary disclosure of firms in a multistakeholder approach

Purpose: Firstly, the aim of our paper is to analyze the relationship between the volatility business industries, measured by standard deviation, and the level of disclosure with reference to the many corporate stakeholders of a representative sample of listed companies. In particular, we have verified the disclosure about the following stakeholders: customers, suppliers, competitors, institutions, environment, community, human capital and corporate governance and financial lenders. For each stakeholder, we have selected a list of disclosure items and we determined an index comparing the number of items disclosed by the company to the maximum number of items identified. Secondly, we tried to highlight the trend over time of the stakeholders’ related disclosure, with reference to the years 2006, 2009 and 2012. Design/methodology/approach: As for the first contribute (analyzing the level of disclosure with reference to the eight corporate stakeholders of listed companies), unlike previous works put in the mainflow “voluntary disclosure literature”. Moreover, our study does not dwell only on the analysis of mandatory annual documents but on all corporate documents: annual and consolidated financial statements, management, sustainability and corporate governance reports. Originality/value: To our knowledge, this is the first study that compute all the stakeholders identified at the same time, by following the “broad” approach of the Stakeholder Theory, that identifies a large number of corporate stakeholders.