The Correlation Between The Intellectual Capital Disclosure Level And The Stakeholder Structure

The objective of the research is to identify the link between the stakeholder structure and the level of disclosure of intellectual capital on a sample of 38 Romanian entities listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange, from fields with a strong emphasis on knowledge. The assessment of the degree of disclosure of intellectual capital was conducted using the content analysis of annual reports of entities investigated in 2010-2013 by leveraging the intellectual capital information according to a list of 72 items taken as a standard. The next step in research is to analyze the structure of stakeholders and their grouping into 4 categories: major shareholders the state and government institutions, foreign investors, institutional investors and the investors as natural persons. The question around which the entire research described in this paper oscillates around is whether the stakeholder structure of an entity influences the level of disclosure on intellectual capital. From this general idea we built 4 research hypotheses in order to identify correlations between the average degree of intellectual capital disclosure and various categories of shareholders. The research has led us to conclude that the disclosure of intellectual capital is influenced by the stakeholder structure. For example, the entities whose owner is the State and government institutions disclose more intellectual capital, while those whose ownership is foreign disclose less. This result is contrary to our expectations, but understandable due to the young capital market in Romania, whose limits are inherent (even regarding the profile of the investors). The entities whose owner is the State and government institutions are generally in the pharmaceutical field, are large entities with an age of more than half a century. The entities whose securities are held mostly by domestic institutional investors or individual investors do not either disclose information on intellectual capital more than the average of the sample. Due to the analytical approach of the connection between the level of capital intellectual disclosure and the stakeholder structure (correlations tested on categories of shareholders), the study receives a novelty character among indigenous studies in the field.