IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cen/wpaper/09-28.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Discretionary Disclosure in Financial Reporting: An Examination Comparing Internal Firm Data to Externally Reported Segment Data

Author

Listed:
  • Daniel Bens
  • Philip Berger
  • Steven Monahan

Abstract

We use confidential, U.S. Census Bureau, plant-level data to investigate aggregation in external reporting. We compare firms� plant-level data to their published segment reports, conducting our tests by grouping a firm�s plants that share the same four-digit SIC code into a �pseudo-segment.� We then determine whether that pseudo-segment is disclosed as an external segment, or whether it is subsumed into a different business unit for external reporting purposes. We find pseudo-segments are more likely to be aggregated within a line-of-business segment when the agency and proprietary costs of separately reporting the pseudo-segment are higher and when firm and pseudo-segment characteristics allow for more discretion in the application of segment reporting rules. For firms reporting multiple external segments, aggregation of pseudo-segments is driven by both agency and proprietary costs. However, for firms reporting a single external segment, we find no evidence of an agency cost motive for aggregation.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel Bens & Philip Berger & Steven Monahan, 2009. "Discretionary Disclosure in Financial Reporting: An Examination Comparing Internal Firm Data to Externally Reported Segment Data," Working Papers 09-28, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
  • Handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:09-28
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2009/CES-WP-09-28.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2009
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. repec:cte:idrepe:id-10-06 is not listed on IDEAS
    2. Gago Rodríguez, Susana, 2010. "Evolutionary model of existing competition and voluntary disclosure," IC3JM - Estudios = Working Papers id-10-06, Instituto Mixto Carlos III - Juan March de Ciencias Sociales (IC3JM).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    manufacturing plants; micro-level data; segment reporting; discretionary disclosure; agency costs; proprietary costs;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cen:wpaper:09-28. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Dawn Anderson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cesgvus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.