The Relationship between Ownership Structure and Voluntary Disclosure among Listed Companies on the Tehran Stock Exchange

Abstract

In the current paper, the relation between ownership structure and voluntary disclosure as an external controlling mechanism in the companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange was investigated. In this regard, a sample of listed firms on the Stock Exchange, which had published the financial statement and the Board of directors related to end of the years 2008 to 2012, were selected and by applying Reports Systematic Eliminating Sampling method, 109 firms were selected. Voluntary disclosure was determined based on Botosan suggested criteria (1997) by 71 criteria which were also been used in previous studies (KashaniPoor et al., 2009). Also ownership structure had been investigated from three different points of view: institutional ownership, concentration ownership and government ownership. The research findings reveal that there is a significant relation between institutional ownership and voluntary disclosure. In this regard, results showed that there is also a significant relationship between centralized ownership and voluntary reveal. Moreover research hypotheses test showed that there is no significant relation between government ownership and voluntary information disclosure. Other result is there is no significant difference between the amount of released information in holding firms and non-holding ones. In this regard, research findings are in line with Bogdan et al. (2009) research who investigated the relationship between voluntary disclosure and ownership structure in Romanian Stock Exchange Market but the results are in contrast with Ang and Mack research (2003).