Intellectual capital disclosure commitment: a myth or reality?

The objective of this empirical research is to assess the information dealing with intellectual capital that firms disclose in their prospectus and the potential influence on their intellectual capital disclosure in the annual report following to the initial public offering. The prospectus of companies that applied for initial listing on Euronext Brussels and Amsterdam between 2005 and 2009 were analyzed, including the first annual report after IPO, by means of a content analysis based on the disclosure index of Bukh et al (2005). First, the prospectus and annual report were compared based on their intellectual capital disclosure. Second, the prospectus and the annual report were studied in order to understand the disclosure practices on IC during a 5 year time period taken the recent financial crisis into account. Third, a model was built in order to explain the impact from IC disclosure in the prospectus on the disclosure in the annual report. Next to the result on the IC index for the prospectus (1), different control variables such as (2) industry, (3) company age, (4) size, (5) auditor and (6) ownership retention were added to the model