Intellectual Capital Reporting Trends in India: An Empirical Study on Selected Companies

Abstract

In the knowledge economy there has been increasing demands from stakeholder’s side to provide sufficient information about company’s ability to create wealth. Today intellectual capital is considered as superior assets for wealth creation. In this study we empirically investigate the intellectual capital reporting trends of 30 Indian knowledge intensive companies. The sample companies are selected, for this study, from the Group-A category companies of the listed companies of Bombay Stock Exchange. We have employed ‘content analysis’ method to measure the frequency of intellectual capital reporting in the annual reports of sample companies over the three-year period starting from 2009 to 2011. The empirical results show that reporting of intellectual capital items is unevenly distributed and information about external capital items are reported mostly. However, an upward trend in IC reporting is found in this study.

Keywords: Intellectual Capital, Disclosure, Annual Reports, Content Analysis, Developing Countries, Knowledge Intensive Companies.

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