
doi: 10.2139/ssrn.817344
The objective of this paper is to study the impact of the Internet on the financial disclosure strategy of the firm. Trabelsi. Labelle and Laurin (2004) document a significant difference between Internet (IFR) and traditional financial reporting (TFR). They use SEDAR as a proxy for TFR. In this paper, we use an enhanced version of the Botosan (1997) disclosure index scoring sheet to measure the extent of this difference for a random sample of firms selected from the Stock Guide Data Base. Unlike TFR, disclosure on Web sites is voluntary and depends on the discretion of the firms' managers. Our objective is to examine managers' incentives to first voluntary broaden the access to their firms' financial information through the use of the Web site and, second, to increase the extent of that information. As a by product, our results also determine if these determinants are the same as those identified in the literature on the quality of voluntary disclosure under TFR. The result of our content analysis of corporate Web sites and TFR shows that the information available on the Web site is primarily incremental for most of the firms. Our multivariate analyses of the determinants governing the decision to increase the access to financial information and its extent through the use of the firm's Web site show that the pressure from investors, the complexity of TFR, the search for visibility, and the threat of litigation all influence the management of financial disclosure on the Internet. In line with the findings obtained by Richardson et al. (1999) in their work on MD&A, our results lead us to conclude that the Internet is part of the firm's overall disclosure package.
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