The information content of mandatory human capital disclosure
Our research is about Human Capital Disclosures made by companies. My role in this research will be to find information about Human Capital Disclosures that companies have made before their most recent 10-K reports, I’m finding this information to see how companies reported information about their human capital before the SEC mandated it. With this information I am going to perform linear regression on company stock prices to see if there is correlation between company stock prices and the amount of human capital information that companies disclose. Human Capital information is of various forms, It can be quantitive like number of employees or percentages of employee composition or qualitative, like work culture, office initiatives taken by companies to make life better for their employees, etc. As such it is hard to distinguish human capital information and hard to tell what effect the information has on investors. The research question we are trying to answer is whether the information that I am gathering actually reflects employee conditions in companies and whether investors take into account or care about this information.