Effects of Corporate Governance on Intellectual Capital Disclosure: An Analysis of Indian Companies

This paper empirically explores the critical connection between intellectual capital disclosure and corporate governance variables, while having firm-specific control variables, for a sample of 137 Indian listed firms. Intellectual capital disclosure is recorded by a self-developed index score used on the annual reports of the sample companies, along with an attempt to capture the qualitative aspect of the intellectual capital disclosure in the form of semantic properties underpinned by Time Expectation theory and the overall word count of intellectual capital in the annual reports. The analysis is further widened by analyzing individually the corporate governance factors with all the three forms of Intellectual capital (Internal, External and Human). Most of the corporate governance variables within the analysis is associated with the disclosure practices of Intellectual capital be it quantitative or qualitative. Thus, this paper attempts to extend the previous literatures with a specialized case of an emerging economy along with contributing towards the agency theory by establishing the links between corporate governance and disclosure practices.