The transparency with which companies disclose information to the market has been recognized as one of the main pillars of the good practices of Corporate Governance. In addition, the old paradigm of the communication passes through transformations deriving from the Digital Age. Therefore, companies are increasingly using the Internet as a means of investor relations, consequently offering a higher degree of disclosure to the market. The aim of this sarticle aims is to verify the existence of a relationship between characteristics of the companies and the voluntary disclosure of financial information through the World Wide Web, taking Brazilian companies as reference. The study consists in a cross section of data from 291 non-financial companies listed in the São Paulo Stock Exchange in 2002. The evidence suggests that company size as well as smaller annual stock returns are associated to greater amounts of financial information in the corporate Website.
Corporate governance; Disclosure; Internet; Brazilian firms; Corporate finance
