Investigating the Effects of Disclosure of Non-Financial Intangible Information on Investors’ Judgment about Future Financial Performance of the Company

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate the needs of users in connection with the information of intangible assets in current financial statements with an emphasis on the way of disclosing non-financial information. For this purpose, the effect of the two independent variables of causal links’ discussion and level of non-financial performance on the financial performance of the firm, as the dependent variable, has been studied. The research is applied in terms of its objective and it is a survey in terms of the research design. The research population includes PhD students of accounting in top-ranking universities of Iran. Statistical methods, including test ratio, single-sample t-test, independent t-test, and one-way and two-way variance analysis have been used to test hypotheses. The findings show that the disclosure of non-financial intangible information along with causal links does not affect the judgment of investors with a low or high level of knowledge. However, it should be noted that the recall of the performance in terms of non-financial criteria by investors, who have a causal link discussion, is higher than others.