The influence of culture, legal system,and corporate governance on the strategic and operational content of corporate annual reports

We examine aspects of cultural dimensions, legal systems and corporate governance on the extent that firms from the United States, United Kingdom, France and Brazil disclose their strategy in annual reports of 2006. We based our analysis on concepts brought by three theories: cultural dimensions (Hofstede, 1997); legal systems (La Porta, Lopez-De-Silanes and Shleifer, 1999; Glaeser & Shleifer, 2002); and corporate governance (La Porta et al., 1999; Bushman & Smith, 2001). Each company?s annual report was entirely analyzed to assess its strategy disclosure. The hypotheses were tested through regression analysis and nonparametric tests of equality of means. The results indicate that the extent to which companies in common law countries disclosure their strategies is greater than in civil law ones. Also, we observed that firms less frequently disclose information with operational content in comparison with information with corporate strategic content.