The Determinants of Financial Reporting on The Internet: The Case of Companies Listed in The Istanbul Stock Exchange

Abstract

The objective of this article is to explore the practices of Internet financial reporting by Turkish companies listed on Istanbul Stock Exchange  (ISE). For this purpose, the study investigated the the association between key firm characteristics and the level of internet financial reporting by Turkish companies. The sample which was examined contains 263 publicly traded Turkish companies listed on the Istanbul Stock Exchange. The sample of the study contains companies with web sites as of December 2012. To achieve the purpose of the study descriptive analysis, multicollinearity analysis and regression analysis were employed. The findings of the study show positive relationships between the Internet financial reporting (measured by disclosure index) and the 4 independent variables which are size, leverage, profitability and liquidity. Furthermore,  the findings reveal that the size of the firm and profitability variables are statistically significant at the 5% level while the liquidity and leverage variables appeared to be statistically insignificant at the 5% level.

Keywords: Internet, financial reporting, disclosure index.