Determinants of Intellectual Capital Disclosure: Evidence from Indian Pharmaceutical Sector

Globalization and rapid technological development have created the lot of changes in the different sects of human life, including business sector. One of it is that traditional accounting and reporting practices couldn't explain the exact status of the business because of increasing importance of intangible assets rather than tangible. As an evidence for this, researchers have identified the growing disparity between book value and market value of the company. Hence, this paper is an effort to identify the determinant of Intellectual capital disclosure which is firm-specific in Indian context. As far IC concerned, it possesses a vital role because of as said before increasing disparity between market value and book value of companies. Literature are saying IC can explain or at least can reduce this disparity. This study has chosen leading pharmaceutical companies included in Pharma sector. For this study, annual reports of a sample of 10 companies from NSE Pharma Index are analyzed over a three-year period from 2015-2017. Content analysis has been applied to calculate Intellectual Capital Disclosure score and Regression models are used to examine the relationship between IC disclosure and the selected variables. Results reveal that IC disclosure in Indian pharmaceutical sector is increasing year by year. While considering multiple regression analysis, the age of the company and number of independent directors are showing a significant positive relationship with Intellectual Capital disclosure. In other hand, variables such as value added intellectual coefficient (VAIC) and leverage, size of the firm and profitability are showing an insignificant relationship with IC disclosure.