Determinants and effects of human capital reporting and controlling

Abstract

Human capital is one of the most important organizational resources. Nevertheless, companies’ internal and external management control and reporting instruments only marginally take human capital into account. The purpose of this paper is therefore twofold: In the first section, we empirically identify the drivers influencing external human capital reporting by assuming that companies reporting on their human capital use the same information that they do for internal control purposes. We thus extract this information from corporate annual reports by means of content analysis. Subsequently, we analyze 130 listed German companies’ number of human capital disclosures and their content. Our results show that human capital reporting is influenced by firm size, industry membership, and shareholder structure. In the second section, we introduce an indicator-based instrument for active human capital controlling. That is, we show how human capital can be actively controlled with regard to corporate strategy and, thus, be integrated into traditional management control instruments.