Dominant voluntary disclosure on Stockholm Stock Exchange

Background: In the last decades voluntary disclosure has become more common. The available research on the subject has mainly focused on the motive of voluntary disclosure rather than the content or what kind of information is published most frequent. There is a shortcoming in the academic literature about what information outflow is focused on and to whom. Henceforth this study aims to analyze the voluntary disclosure in the annual report among listed companies on the Swedish Stock Exchange. Purpose: The purpose of the study is to operationalize and describe voluntary disclosure to contribute empirically to the knowledge gap within the subject. The study intends to clarify the type of voluntary disclosure that dominates in annual reports on Stockholm Stock Exchange. Method: To answer our purpose of this study as well as possible we conducted a qualitative content analysis with selected companies’ annual reports. This literature study has an abductive research strategy based on collecting empirical data from the annual reports of the companies with the most new owners by 2020. Based on a checklist and a coding scheme, the empirical data will be quantified, analyzed and compared. Results and conclusions:We found in accordance that the companies published a considerably high amount of voluntary disclosure in their annual report. The companies with the most new owners distinguished themselves by publishing more voluntary information than companies with fewer new owners. The categories of voluntary disclosure that were given the highest priority were financial information about the company and organization