The Level of Voluntary Electronic Disclosure in Jordanian Companies and Factors that Influence the Level of this Disclosure: An applied study on Jordanian Companies listed in Amman Stock Exchange

The aim of this research paper was to explore the level of electronic disclosure on financial and non-financial information of Jordanian corporations listed in Amman Stock Exchange (ASE), and to identify factors that have an impact on electronic disclosure used by Jordanian corporations. Finally, the research also intended to examine the level of each financial and non-financial items on the basis of data published in 2014. The Internet Disclosure Index (IDI), which consisted of 40 items was constructed and used to measure the level of the Internet-based disclosure. Simple linear regression analysis was used to analyze research data. The population of the current research comprised all Jordanian public-listed corporations in Amman Stock Exchange Securities in 2014. There were 270 corporations distributed on four sectors; banking, insurance, services as well as industry. The results revealed that 48.9% (132 corporations) have websites and 51.1% (138) have no websites. It was concluded that the level of the Internet-based disclosure is 6.6%. Finally, the findings indicated that there was an association between company size, liquidity, profitability, audit office size, and the level of the Internet-based disclosure. On the other hand, company efficiency, financial leverage along with debt to equity ratio were found to have no association with the level of the Internet-based disclosure.