Intellectual capital disclosure in China: an empirical study

We develop a descriptive framework of the components of intellectual capital (IC) in annual reports and investigate the effects of disclosure of IC on market capitalization. We use content analysis to analyze the annual reports of a sample of Fortune 100 listed companies in 2006 announced by Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. We select the 49 listed companies for content analysis of their 226 annual reports over the five-year period of 2001-2005. There is a highly significant and positive correlation between IC disclosure and market capitalization. In china, some high quality listed companies have existed IC information and increased year after year. More and more listed companies disclose their IC information spontaneity in structure capital, customer capital, and human capital, although Ministry of Finance only give the criterion on structure. There exists significant difference between industries when using ICR to analyze the competitive power. Copyright © 2010 Editorial Department of Journal of Donghua University.