Managerial discretion and voluntary disclosure: Empirical evidence from the New Zealand life insurance industry

The managerial discretion hypothesis holds that variations in the degree of autonomy afforded to managers in insurance companies can be explained by corporate-specific factors such as organizational form and firm size (, pp. 351-378; , pp. 638-655). To the extent that the public disclosure decisions of life insurance companies are likely to be linked to managerial discretion, valuable insights could be gained from applying the managerial discretion hypothesis to explain differences in the level of information voluntarily disclosed by life insurance companies in their annual reports. The relation between voluntary disclosure and eight explanatory variables representing the major constructs of the managerial discretion hypothesis is thus specified in the form a fixed-effects regression model using 1988-1993 data drawn from New Zealand's (NZ) life insurance industry. The results indicate that organizational form, firm size, product diversity and distribution system, are positively related to the level of voluntary disclosure as implied by the managerial discretion hypothesis. In contrast, assets-in-place and localization of operations are not significant variables. Two independent variables - non-executive directors and reinsurance - are statistically significant, but in the opposite direction to that predicted.