Determinants of Transparency for Singaporean Listed Companies

Abstract

The extent to which companies disclose information about their activities, corporate transparency, is universally regarded as a vital prerequisite for the efficient functioning, vibrancy, and fairness of stock markets. If companies are completely open and frank, so the accepted wisdom goes, then investors stand to be able to make well informed investment decisions. Countries around the world rely upon a mixture of securities regulation and market driven measures to achieve the desired level of transparency. Many countries use awards schemes to promote high standards of disclosure. Recently, Singapore witnessed the introduction of an index to help boost what many feel to be low levels of transparency amongst local listed companies. The Corporate Transparency Index (CTI) was introduced by Singapore financial daily, The Business Times. The CTI measures a company's degree of openness by focusing on the release of the interim results of listed companies. Unlike other measures of transparency it looks not only at the content of the results release but also how that content is communicated to the markets. This paper seeks to identify the key determinants of a company's transparency score. The provisional findings suggest company size and profitability correlate positively with corporate transparency.