1 Introduction

Voluntary disclosures of information in annual reports of companies have increased substantially over the years and have been an area of interest for researchers over the years (Cooke 1989; Skinner 1994; Courtis 1999; Hossain and Adams 1995). Voluntary disclosure is disclosing information which is more than what is mandated by the regulatory authorities or agencies in various countries. According to Stanga (1976), good disclosures, among others, will foster a healthy relationship between a company and professional analysts; will tend to lessen fluctuations in security prices and help eliminate insider profit and related legal problems. Companies disclose voluntary information for varied reasons. Some companies provide voluntary disclosures in an effort to distinguish their products from those of their competitors (Ismail 2001), while others are of the view that such disclosures of accounting information voluntarily would help raise additional capital (Craven and Marston 1999). Motivating factors for voluntary disclosures as identified by Subramanyam and Wild (2014) are legal liability, expectations, signalling and managing expectations. Agency theory may also explain why managers disclose voluntary information and at times, competitive market forces may induce the management to disclose more information (Firth 2012). Better disclosure practices are helpful in boosting brand name and goodwill, mitigating frauds and in avoiding litigations and fines (Narayanaswamy 2011). Voluntary disclosure of financial ratios is a form of external corporate governance.

Corporate voluntary disclosures can take several forms. Many studies were conducted on voluntary disclosures; Economic Value Added disclosures by Kaur and Narang 2010, corporate social disclosures by Murthy (2008), intellectual capital disclosures by Joshi et al. (2012), human capital disclosures by Jindal and Kumar (2012). One noteworthy voluntary disclosure is non-mandatory financial ratios and the present study is directed in that direction. Financial ratio disclosures are critically important for several reasons. First, the disclosures could serve as the crucial information for users of financial statements, including sophisticated or non-sophisticated users. Sophisticated users (management, board of directors, investors, shareholders, stakeholders) are reliant on disclosed financial ratios to assess the performance of companies. Therefore, providing a comprehensive set of financial ratios and how each was defined are crucial sources of information. For non-sophisticated users (laymen), the financial ratio disclosures will enable them to make an informed investment decision making. In addition, many ratios computed today are not standard. The lacks of uniformity limits the comparability in financial statements analysis and encourage companies to disclose the most favourable ratios to their firm’s condition (Amran and Aripin 2015). According to Thomas and Evanson (1987), the information from ratio analysis, especially in the form of trend analysis, can be used to forecast the efficiency and profitability of a company as well as to determine its financial position, and possibly, to avoid business failures. According to Barnes (1987), ‘financial ratios are used by accountants and analysts to forecast future financial variables and by researchers for predictive purposes, namely credit rating, assessment of risk and corporate failure’. Financial ratios involve establishing a relevant financial relationship between the components of financial statements for further investigation. It is a powerful tool for recognizing a company’s strength as well as probable trouble spots (Bhatia and Dhamija 2015). According to Watson et al. (2002), ‘the disclosure of ratios in company accounts may provide users of financial statements with new information not calculable elsewhere, or may simply provide information available elsewhere in the same or different form’. Gibson (1982) suggested that financial ratios are more effective in projecting the financial future of a company and that it increases the quality of annual reports.

India is the chosen destination for this study owing to its unique background as an emerging market economy with rapidly growing capital markets. With the advent of liberalization, there are umpteen companies targeting funding from foreign sources. Voluntary disclosures enhance corporate governance practices and helps in attracting investments from overseas markets (Singh and Delios 2017). Hence, the extent of voluntarily disclosed business information available from annual reports of companies will play a huge part in attractive potential investors, both domestic and foreign. However, in India, listed companies are mostly family controlled with majority holdings in shares and board positions. Hence, such family-owned companies do not have much motivation to disclose additional business information over and above the mandatory requirements. This attribute in the Indian stock market structure provides for a fascinating understudy when looked at in the context of the rising qualm for internationalization and global transparency. The study has gained momentum with the introduction of New Companies Act, 2013. The new act has given a lot of impetus to corporate governance, disclosure practices and transparency in operations. Board Characteristics which is one of the aspects of corporate governance norms has significant impact on the performance of companies. Companies with independent directors on the board and CEO duality (CEO and CMD) are most likely to diversify domestically or venture into overseas markets thus improving the performance of companies (Singh and Delios 2017; Gaur and Kumar 2009; Singh and Gaur 2009). The study would entail for extended studies on evaluation of voluntary disclosure patterns of Indian companies.

The present paper focuses on voluntary disclosure of financial ratios as it would be of value to users of annual reports as seen from the above citations. This paper is based on a study by Abdullah and Ismail (2008) and Bhatia and Dhamija (2015). The objectives of this study are as follows:

  • To determine the extent of voluntary disclosure of financial ratios in annual reports of S&P CNX 500 companies.

  • To construct a voluntary disclosure index to be applied to annual reports of the selected S&P CNX companies and examine the association between the index with firm specific characteristics and industry classification.

The rest of the sections are organised as follows—Sect. 2 presents the theoretical framework and review of literature, Sect. 3 describes the methodology including hypotheses development and testing, Sect. 4 provides the findings of the study, Sect. 5 provides findings and implications and Sect. 6 provides directions for future research.

2 Theoretical framework and literature review

2.1 Theoretical framework

The purpose of providing theoretical framework is to reiterate the importance and motivation of pursuing a research study. Theoretical framework broadly on ‘Voluntary Disclosure’ are the following:

2.1.1 Agency theory

Jensen and Meckling (1976: 308) define the agency relationship as “a contract under which one or more persons (the principals) engage another person (the agent) to perform some service on their behalf which involves delegating some decision-making authority to the agent.” Agents correspond to managers, whereas principals correspond to shareholders from a companies’ perspective. Agency costs stem from the assumption that the two parties, agents and principals, have different interests. Monitoring costs are paid by the principals, shareholders, to limit the agents’ aberrant activities. Bonding costs are paid by the agents, managers, to guarantee that no harm of the principal’s interests will result from their decisions and actions. Residual loss stems when decisions of the agents diverge from decisions that would maximize the principal’s welfare. Accordingly, the agency cost is the summation of the monitoring cost, bonding cost, and the residual loss. The agency relationship leads to the information asymmetry problem due to the fact that managers can access information more than shareholders. Optimal contracts is one of the means of mitigating the agency problem as it helps in bringing shareholders’ interests in line with managers’ interests. In addition, voluntary disclosure is another means of mitigating the agency problem, where managers disclose more voluntary information reducing the agency costs and also to convince the external users that managers are acting in an optimal manner (Shehata 2014). A strong governance structure is a way to mitigate principal–agency problem as it has a positive impact on company performance in terms of innovation and diversification (Singh and Gaur 2013; Gaur and Delios 2015).

2.1.2 Signalling theory

Although the signalling theory was originally developed to clarify the information asymmetry in the labour market, it has been used to explain voluntary disclosure in corporate reporting. As a result of the information asymmetry problem, companies signal certain information to investors to show that they are better than other companies in the market for the purpose of attracting investments and enhancing a favourable reputation. For instance, when plans about acquisitions are announced, it signals the potential for future growth of companies (Gaur et al. 2013). Voluntary disclosure is one of the signalling means, where companies would disclose more information than what is mandatorily required as per laws and regulations in order to signal that they are better (Shehata 2014).

2.1.3 Capital need theory

Companies aim to attract external finance to increase their capital, either by debt or equity. The capital need theory suggests that voluntary disclosure helps in achieving a company’s need to raise capital at a low cost. In 2001, according to the Improved Business Reporting: Insights into Enhancing Voluntary Disclosure, which is published by the Financial Accounting Standards Board as part of their broader Business Reporting Research Project, the competition for capital leads to increased voluntary disclosure. The rationale beyond this is the fact that “a company’s cost of capital is believed to include a premium for investors’ uncertainty about the adequacy and accuracy of the information available about the company.” Therefore, reduction in a company’s cost of capital is achieved when investors are able to interpret the company’s economic prospects through voluntary disclosure (Financial Accounting Standards Board, 2001). The relationship between voluntary disclosure and cost of capital was thought to be a positive relationship; the higher the information disclosures, the lower the cost of capital (Shehata 2014).

2.2 Literature review

The literature on accounting disclosures are substantial and these studies cover a broad range of issues. Studies on corporate disclosure practices either investigate mandatory or voluntary disclosures or both. Financial ratios’ disclosures fall under the purview of voluntary disclosures. Keeping this in mind, literatures relating to utility of financial ratios and voluntary disclosure of financial ratios are discussed in the ensuing pages. The approach as suggested by Gaur and Kumar (2018) has been followed for conducting review studies.

There has been an increasing interest in voluntary disclosures, however, there are only a few studies available on financial ratios’ disclosure. Previous studies examined the use of financial ratios to predict failure/bankruptcy (Beaver 1966; Altman 1968; Houghton 1984). According to Beaver (1966), the utility of ratios depends on a particular objective for which it is being calculated. Lee and Tweedie (1977) opined that several ratios are important enough to indicate the financial performance of companies. Financial ratios provide insights about company’s financial performance (Subramanyam and Wild 2014).

Williamson (1984) studied the selective reporting of financial ratios and found that three of the eleven selected ratios (i.e. return on equity, current ratio, and return on sales) were more likely to be disclosed by firms. The conclusion was that the selective reporting of financial ratios appears to be more dependent on deviation from industry medians than on improvements in the ratios. Watson et al. (2002) carried out a study on U.K. companies’ practices of voluntary disclosure of ratios. According to them, companies which are large in size disclose more ratios as compared to companies which are small in size. The nature of the business also has an impact on voluntary disclosure practices. It was observed that utility and media companies were disclosing fewer ratios in U.K. In Malaysia, a study conducted by Awang et al. (2004) on financial ratio disclosure (both mandatory and voluntary) shows that there are variations in the extent of disclosure by Malaysian listed companies. The study revealed that the most frequently reported ratio was earnings per share (EPS), followed by dividends per share and net tangible assets per share. Since EPS and dividends per share are mandatory ratios, the findings are expected. Awang et al. (2004) argued that the level of voluntary disclosure of financial ratios was still low. In addition, they concluded that firm size is significantly and positively associated with the extent of financial ratios disclosed in the annual reports.

Abdullah and Ismail (2008) researched on voluntary ratio disclosure practices of Malaysian companies. They found that large and regulated companies disclose more than others and it also depends on internal and external antecedents such as firm and industry norms. They recommended that disclosures of ratios should be standardised so that the users and analysts gain from it. Aripin et al. (2011), studied the extent of financial ratios disclosure and determinants of disclosures for Australian firms. It was observed that the firm’s size, non-audit fees and profitability have influence on the extent of financial ratio disclosures. Uyar and Merve (2012) investigated the influence of firm characteristics on voluntary disclosure of financial ratios in the annual reports of Turkish listed companies. The sample consisted of industrial firms listed in the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE). The findings revealed that Turkish listed firms disclose, on an average, 5.37 financial ratios in their annual reports. The results of multivariate analyses indicated that firm size, auditor size, profitability and ownership diffusion have significant positive association with voluntary disclosure level of financial ratios, while leverage does not. Bhatia and Dhamija (2015) studied the magnitude of voluntary financial ratio disclosures in India by selecting CNX 100 National Stock Exchange companies. According to them, the magnitude of voluntary disclosure of financial ratios was low. The voluntary disclosures of financial ratios were influenced by market capitalisation and efficiency of asset usage. Amran and Aripin (2015) in their study of 100 selected companies from Malaysia found that on an average 18.64% of the firms disclosed financial ratios and Net Profit Ratio was the most popular ratio presented in the annual reports.

Research questions:

  1. 1.

    Do firm specific characteristics such as profitability, liquidity, efficiency and industry classification jointly influence voluntary disclosure index?

  2. 2.

    What are the financial ratios mostly disclosed by companies in India?

  3. 3.

    What is the disclosure pattern of companies included in S&P CNX 500? (The S&P CNX 500 is India’s first broad-based stock market index of the Indian stock market. The S&P CNX 500 represents about 96% of total market capitalization and about 93% of the total turnover on the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE). It is used for a variety of purposes such as benchmarking fund portfolios, index based derivatives and index funds.)

2.3 Hypotheses development

In hindsight, the studies have tried to associate voluntary disclosure of financial ratios by firms with size, nature of business and profitability. Based on the reviews and the research questions, the following hypotheses are developed for the study in Indian context. The study proposes to test the association between voluntary disclosure index and factors such as profitability, liquidity, efficiency, size and industry classification.

H 1

There is significant association between voluntary disclosure index and profitability of the companies.

H 2

There is significant association between voluntary disclosure index and liquidity of the companies.

H 3

There is significant association between voluntary disclosure index and leverage of the companies.

H 4

There is significant association between voluntary disclosure index and size of the companies.

H 5

There is significant association between voluntary disclosure index and industry classification of the companies.

3 Methodology

3.1 Data and period of study

The data for the study is secondary in nature. The secondary data has been collected from the annual reports of the companies which can be downloaded from the respective company’s website. The investor section in the websites contains the audited annual reports and other related documents. The period of study is for the year 2016–17.

3.2 Sample selection

S&P CNX index consists of 500 companies drawn from various sectors. A sample of 423 companies was selected for the purpose of the study. The balance belonged to banking and financial services sector and hence has been excluded from the study. The ratios and regulatory requirements of such companies are different and hence excluded from the study. The sample size is assumed to be sufficient because it satisfies the rule of thumb that a sample size larger than 30 companies and less than 500 is appropriate for most studies (Abdullah and Ismail 2008).

3.3 Scoring of variables and construction of index

For measuring the level of financial ratio disclosure, index of disclosure method is used, owing to its wider use by researchers and acceptability. The index for disclosure index can be created either by using weighted or un-weighted scores. Many researchers have used weighted disclosure index where in different items are assigned different weights on the basis of importance or type of disclosure (Bergamini and Zambon 2002; Kang 2006). Watson et al. (2002), Abdullah and Ismail (2008) in Malaysia, Bhatia and Dhamija (2015) have used un-weighted disclosure index wherein equal importance is assigned to all the items. The basis of using un-weighted index is that the annual reports are read by various stakeholders with different objectives, thus they attach different importance to these items and as the paper is modelled in the similar lines of Abdullah and Ismail (2008), an un-weighted index for analysis purpose.

Financial ratios are classified into seven categories, i.e., profitability, leverage, efficiency, liquidity, dividend, turnover and investment ratios. Within these categories there is further sub classification. The mandatory accounting ratios, i.e., dividend per share and earnings per share are ignored as the study is based on voluntary disclosure of financial ratios.

For constructing the disclosure index, each company is given a score of 1 for every ratio disclosed and nil score for ratio not disclosed. Disclosure index is made by dividing the total number of financial ratio disclosed by the maximum score attained by a company in a sample, i.e., average is considered. A score sheet was prepared after perusing details of the annual report of the sampled companies.

$${\text{Disclosure}}\;{\text{score}} = \sum\limits_{{{\text{i}} = 1}}^{\text{n}} {\text{d}} ,$$

where d = 1 if the ratio is disclosed and nil if it is not; and n = Number of items.

Disclosure index = Disclosure score/Highest score by a company in the sample

3.4 Tools for data analysis

SPSS software was used to perform the statistical analysis. Statistical analysis include testing for multicollinearity and multiple regression analysis (Gaur and Gaur 2009). Descriptive analysis was carried out using MS-Excel.

3.5 Model specification

Keeping in view the objective of the study, multiple regression analysis is considered as an appropriate model. The attributes that influence the voluntary financial ratio disclosure (dependent variable) are profitability, liquidity, leverage, efficiency and size of the company. Ratio disclosures also depend on the sector classification. Sector classification is considered by using dummy variables.

$${\text{Y}}_{\text{IndexI}} =\upalpha +\upbeta_{1} {\text{X}}_{\text{RoIf}} +\upbeta_{2} {\text{X}}_{\text{CR}} +\upbeta_{3} {\text{X}}_{\text{DE}} +\upbeta_{4} {\text{X}}_{\text{ATR}} +\upbeta_{5} {\text{X}}_{\text{size}} + \varSigma\upbeta_{\text{j}} {\text{X}}_{\text{j}} +\upvarepsilon$$

Description of dependent and independent variables of the model are as follows

 

Explanation

Dependent variable

Index

Voluntary financial ratio disclosure represented by the ratio of the number of financial ratios disclosed by the highest score

Independent variables

RoI

Profitability represented by return on investment as on March 31, 2017

CR

Liquidity represented by current ratio as on March 31, 2017

DE

Leverage represented by debt equity ratio as on March 31, 2017

ATR

Efficiency represented asset turnover ratio as on March 31, 2017

Size

Size represented by natural logarithm of market capitalisation as on March 31, 2017

Xj = IndClass

For Industry Classification, seven dummy variables (X6–X15) are used one each for automobiles, consumer goods, energy, infrastructure, pharmaceuticals, IT and services industry, AG and others, each of these is assigned a value of 1 when they fell in the industry group represented by it

Sectors

Abbreviations

IT, software and services

IT

Energy

Energy

Pharmaceuticals

Pharma

Automobiles

AU

Consumer goods

CG

Agriculture

AG

Diversified

Div

Chemicals

Chem

Infrastructure

IN

Others

Others

4 Analysis and interpretation

Table 1 shows the companies selected for the purpose of study. Out of 500 companies, 77 companies represented ‘Banking and Financial Services’. Since the reporting pattern of such companies is different, those companies were not considered for the study. The final sample stands at 423. The table also shows that majority (23%) represented ‘Infrastructure Sector’ followed by Consumer Goods (20%), Automobile (17%), IT and Services (16%) respectively (Fig. 1).

Table 1 Companies selected for the study.
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Fig. 1
figure 1

Companies selected for the study

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Table 2 shows the different types of ratios disclosed by companies during the period of study. The ratios were categorised as ‘Profitability’, ‘Liquidity’, ‘Leverage’, ‘Investments’, ‘Turnover’ and ‘Dividends’. The table shows that majority of the companies disclosed profitability ratios (35%). EBITDA margin, EAT margin were the most common ratios disclosed by companies. 14% of the companies disclosed investment ratios. Return on Capital Employed and Return on Networth were the ratios most disclosed by companies. 25% of the companies disclosed leverage ratios with debt equity ratio being the most disclosed one under this category. 6% of the companies disclosed liquidity ratios. 10% of the companies disclosed dividend ratios with dividend payout ratio being the most disclosed ratio (Fig. 2).

Table 2 Number of companies disclosing different types of ratios.
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Fig. 2
figure 2

Number of companies disclosing different types of ratios

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Table 3 shows the frequency of companies disclosing financial ratios during the period of study. Out of 423 companies, 107 companies did not disclose any ratios, which is 25.30% of the sample size. 54 companies are disclosing only one ratio. There are 231 companies which disclose ratios between 2 and 8. There is only one company which discloses 18 ratios which is 0.24% of the sample.

Table 3 Frequency of companies disclosing voluntary accounting ratios.
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Table 4 shows the descriptive statistics of the dependent variable and the explanatory variables. Out of the total number of ratios considered for the study in the disclosure list (18), the companies disclose on an average of 19.05% of the ratios which is approximately 4 ratios. This implies that the extent of voluntary disclosure of financial ratios by companies is low. The table also presents the descriptive statistics of independent variables.

Table 4 Descriptive statistics of dependent and explanatory variables.
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Table 5 shows the result of Pearson correlation coefficients among the variables. The correlation coefficients were analysed to explore the presence of multicollinearity. Multicollinearity refers to close relations between various variables. A general rule is, if the correlation coefficient is between − 0.7 and 0.7, then there is no problem using independent variables for the study (Lind et al. 2008). The correlation coefficient matrix reveals that there is no multicollinearity between the variables during the period of study. All the explanatory variables were retained for the analysis. To check further, Variance Inflation Factor (VIF) test was also conducted. It is usually accepted that if any VIF is more than 10 and the tolerance value is below 0.10, there is a problem of multicollinearity. The VIF results are shown in Table 6.

Table 5 Pearson correlation coefficient among variables
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Table 6 Summary of regression results
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Table 6 reveals the summary of regression results. The adjusted R2 and F values are 0.115 and 2.643 respectively, implying that the model is significant. The model can explain 11.5% variation in the disclosure index by the explanatory variables. The results indicate that there is an association between the level of disclosure, Return on Investment, firm size measured by natural logarithm of market capitalisation and industry classification. The β values of Size (0.172) and RoI (0.099) indicates that the level of disclosure is positively associated with the size and performance of the company. This implies that large companies are more likely to disclose more ratios than smaller companies. Similarly, companies with better returns on investments are likely to disclose financial ratios. Therefore hypothesis ‘H1’ &‘H4’ are accepted. The β value of ‘Infra’ is 0.123 at 5% level of significance (p < 0.05), indicating that infrastructure companies disclose more ratios than companies in other sectors. The β value of ‘Energy’ is − 0.115 (p < 0.05) and IT with a β of − 0.098 (p < 0.10), indicates that Energy and IT companies disclose less ratios than companies in other sectors. The other variables namely, Pharma, CG, AG, AU, others ‘β’ values are not statistically significant (p > 0.10). Companies of Infrastructure, Energy and IT sector have an association with voluntary disclosure indeed and hence hypothesis ‘H5’ is accepted. The other firm specific variable viz., DE and CR ‘β’ values are not statistically significant (p > 0.10) and therefore do not have any association with voluntary disclosure index. Hence, hypotheses H2 and H3 are rejected.

5 Findings and implications

The anaylsis of S&P CNX 500 companies shows that the voluntary disclosure of financial ratios is low. It is evident from the research that financial ratios disclosure is not of great importance for companies listed in India. Companies on an average reveal 3–4 ratios voluntarily. The findings are consistent with the studies of Abdullah and Ismail (2008), Bhatia and Dhamija (2015) and Amran and Aripin (2015). The study also finds that there are two extreme samples in the study. On one hand, there are 107 companies which do not disclose any ratios, whereas there is only one company which has disclosed 18 ratios. The most common ratios published are EBITDA margin, EAT margin and Return on Capital Employed. The study also finds that only four variables, RoI, size, infrastructure and energy influence the disclosure index of companies selected for the study. The implication of the study is that large companies in terms of market capitalisation and better return on investments disclose more ratios voluntarily than smaller and relatively poor performing companies. Companies representing infrastructure sector disclose more ratios than companies from other sectors. Companies from Energy sector disclose fewer ratios when compared to companies in other sectors. The findings are inconsistent with earlier studies (Abdullah and Ismail 2008; Varghese 2011; Uyar and Merve 2012; Bhatia and Dhamija 2015) which stated size, liquidity and efficiency as the variables significantly influence voluntary disclosure of financial ratios. The study also found that there is no uniformity in disclosing financial ratios in the annual reports. This may be due to the absence of standards and lack of guidelines from the regulatory authorities. Financial ratios are considered as one of the important tools of analysis, the inclusion of which in the annual reports shall reduce the information asymmetry. Investors and analysts use ratios for comparability purposes, standardization of the method of calculations will help them compare the performance of companies sector-wise and decide on the best investment vehicle. The empirical findings show a positive relationship between disclosure index and selected performance variables. In order to apply the findings to practical use, a lot rides on the nature of the voluntary disclosure, i.e. strategic, financial or corporate governance information. The need of the hour for the regulatory authority in India is to take a firm call on making a select set of ratios under each category mandatory, standardize calculation of ratios ensuring uniformity in disclosures, resulting in better investment decisions by stakeholders. The disclosing of ratios will strengthen the corporate governance norms and it is also an indication of sustainability of companies in terms of performance. The findings demonstrate the need for a shift in strategic thinking at the board level and senior management of listed Indian companies. Thus, the methodological approach and findings from this research enrich the existing literature on the relationship between voluntary disclosure of financial ratios, firm specific characteristics and industry classification.

6 Directions for future research

Research is an on going process. The present study has identified certain factors which can be considered when research activities in this topic are undertaken in the future to augment the literature. The present study has not factored the ownership structure of the companies to explain the variation in the disclosure index. Ownership structure refers to the promoters stake in the total shareholdings of a company. The results may vary if ownership structure is also considered as an explanatory variable. Also, in future studies can consider corporate governance variables (board composition, board size, board independence) to check whether such variables also jointly influence voluntary disclosure of ratios. Apart from variables relating to corporate governance, variables such as financial position (profit or loss) and the presence of reputed audit firms’ impact on voluntary disclosure ratios can also be factored in the research. The present study has found that ‘Industry’ variable as a factor has association with disclosure index. Hence, sector specific studies can be undertaken in the future. This is to identify sector-wise discriminating factors in influencing voluntary disclosure of ratios. A comparative study of the extent of voluntary disclosures between companies listed in Indian and other emerging markets across the global can be taken up. This will lend credence to the idea that top-performing companies worldwide disclose company information in a uniform manner. Since, the present study is based on the published annual reports of the companies, a primary survey measuring the perception of CFOs of Companies on voluntary disclosure of financial ratios will add more value to the existing literature.