Corportate disclosure and digital culture: some evidence from the Italian Stock Exchange

The aim of the paper is to introduce the concept of digital corporate disclosure and stimulate the scientific community to develop a fruitful debate on the measurement systems of digital disclosure. The corporate disclosure is an information process that has been argued by many authors who demonstrate, in different ways, the correlation between the disclosure and the business results. At the same time, the conceptualization provided by the literature focus on the centrality of the digital culture in our century as part of a wider phenomenon: the information culture. In this scenario, the information culture becomes the system in which the corporate disclosure and the digital culture are merging to achieve business results. Hence, our evaluation focus on the digital corporate disclosure, following the idea that companies’websites are communication vehicles that widespread information. In this sense, our goal is to formalize a model able to assess companies’ websites in order to evaluate the digital disclosure level. From the analysis of firms’ websites of the sample – made by 39 firms listed in the Italian Stock Exchange and operating in the entertainment sector – we’ve built an evaluation pattern made by eleven indicators. In conclusion, a correlation is carried out between the results and the efficiency indicators, the intangible investments and the governance indicators, in order to verify the determinants of the digital disclosure.