Voluntary disclosure and stock return volatility - A study of consumer products industry in Ho Chi Minh stock exchange (2013-2015)
Abstract
Narrow down to Voluntary Disclosure characteristics in Vietnam context, the study found out the slight negative impacts of it on stock return volatility – a promising proxy for information asymmetry by investigating 64 Consumer Staples and Discretionary firms through their annual reports. The Voluntary Disclosure construct is categorized into 4 groups including Forward-Looking Information, General and Strategic Information, Corporate Social Responsibility Information and Financial and Capital Market Information with the decreasing level of disclosure respectively. Consumer Staples firms tend to disclose voluntarily more than Consumer Discretionary group of firms, which helps to explain these stock return volatility are less risky. One of interesting findings is that despite the increase trend of Voluntary Disclosure level from 35.66% to 40.13% in 2012 and 2014, Vietnam Dairy Products Joint Stock Company (VNM) - the best annual report award in 2014 had lower Voluntary Disclosure Index (VDI) score than many others. This result implies that Voluntary Disclosure in annual reports in both terms of quantity concerned by the researcher and quality are essential, especially modern trend of disclosure focuses not only on information volume but also its relevancy and materiality.
KEYWORDS
Voluntary Disclosure, Stock Return Volatility, Consumer Products Industry, Asymmetric Information, Annual Reports