CORPORATE REPUTATION AND DISCLOSURE LEVEL IN OPEN CAPITAL BRAZILIAN COMPANIES

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze whether the corporate reputation in may be considered as a driver to the voluntary disclosure level in open capital Brazilian companies. The development of the research was done through an empirical research, examining 115 observations in 23 Brazilian companies in the period from 2000 to 2004. In the process of data analyses, the panel data was used, adopting the random effects approach, therefore, for purposes of this study, this was the approach that turned out to be the most appropriate. According to the results, it was found out that corporate reputation has a positive association with the quantity of voluntary disclosure, suggesting that open capital Brazilian companies which have strong reputation provide greater voluntary disclosure to their stakeholders, thus, the corporate reputation would be one of the drivers to the voluntary disclosure level in Brazilian companies. Additionally, this study provides evidence that the size of the company also affects the amount of voluntary disclosure, so larger companies have more voluntary disclosure, possibly due to lower disclosure costs.