Firm level determinants of corporate web transparency and its relation to company performance

The importance of the corporate governance is increased after the big corporate scandals like Enron, WorldCom and Parmalat. Sarbanes Oxley Act increased regulation in the U.S. and rest of the world followed. Although in Turkey New Turkish Commercial Code made the necessary changes to improve corporate governance practices and also corporate transparency which is a part of good corporate governance practices. There are two main purposes of this study, first one is to identify the firm level determinants of corporate web transparency and the second purpose is to find the effect of corporate web transparency on the relationship of financial information and firm value of firms quoted at Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) . The first chapter defines corporate governance and discussed corporate governance in Turkey. In the second chapter, corporate transparency and corporate transparency and disclosure studies in Turkey, and the literature on the effects of corporate governance on firm performance is discussed. In the third chapter, an empirical analysis is made for firm level determinants of corporate web transparency and the effect of corporate web transparency and the relationship of financial information and firm value of firms. The data is obtained from the web sites of the sample firms and database web sites for the year of 2011 and the analysis is applied to 209 non-financial firms quoted at ISE. The results show that Market to Book Value, Free Float Ratio and Audit Firms are the important determinants of firm level corporate web transparency, however, we did not find significant support for the effect of web transparency on the relationship of financial information and firm value.