Effect of Stakeholder Power on the Employee Information Disclosure of Nigerian Listed Firms A Panel Study

This study investigates the effect of stakeholder power as one of the three dimensional framework of corporate social responsibility disclosure. The proxy for employee related information is the number of sentences used to report issues about the employee in the annual report. The stakeholder variables are decomposed into number of employees, individual shareholders, majority shareholders, institutional ownership and presence of foreign portfolio investors. However, individual shareholders was excluded because of high co linearity with institutional ownership. The data was extracted from the annual reports of selected 50 quoted firms for a period of three 3 years from 2011 to 2013. Descriptive statistics, correlation and pooled OLS regression analyses were performed. The results indicated among others that Nigerian firms used a range of 6 to 19 sentences to disclose employee related information in annual reports. It also showed that majority shareholders control about 71 of the corporate interest in Nigerian quoted firms while foreign interest was found in about 62 of all the quoted firms in Nigeria. Further analyses with the OLS indicated that stakeholderpower significantly explains 10 the reasons for the disclosure of employee related information in the annual report of firms. Specifically, the results of the hypotheses testing showed as follows the number of employees has negative but insignificant effect on employee information disclosure in Nigeria.the quantity of employee related information made available to the public in the annual reports in Nigeria Presence of majority shareholding significantly reduces CSR disclosure of employee related information in Nigeria by 7.4 Presence of institutional ownership tends to increase but has no significant effect on the quantity of employee related information made available to the public in the annual reports in Nigeria and Presence of foreign portfolio investors tends to increase but has no significant effect on the quantity of employee related information made available to the public in the annual reports in Nigeria. Finally, the ranking of the beta showed that majority shareholding has the highest contribution and thus most influential factors in the disclosure of employee related information. Based on the findings it was concluded that majority shareholding which forms the major interest in Nigerian quoted firms is highly significant in determining the quantity of employee related information disclosed. The study thus recommended among others, that the regulatory authority should specify the level of information about employee which should be made available in annual reports and other channels. Ilechukwu, Felix Ubaka | Prof. M. S. Ifurueze "Effect of Stakeholder Power on the Employee Information Disclosure of Nigerian Listed Firms: A Panel Study" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-1 | Issue-5 , August 2017, URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd2432.pd