Disclosure of university websites. Evidence from Italian data

Marco Bisogno, Francesca Citro and Aurelio Tommasetti

Global Business and Economics Review, 2014, vol. 16, issue 4, 452-471

Abstract: Universities are required to gain a competitive advantage in recruiting students and obtaining funds. The Bologna Declaration has emphasised this process, highlighting both the need to improve quality as well as the importance of providing information to stakeholders. The paper focuses on the information requirements, with the aim of analysing the disclosure of information by Italian universities through their websites. We have calculated both a global disclosure index and different partial disclosure indices relating to the areas of interest of the main stakeholders: the study reveals that Italian universities achieve a satisfactory rate in disclosing information relating to research and teaching activities. We have also performed a disclosure determinant analysis in order to investigate the reasons why some universities disclose more or less information than others: complexity and social responsibility are the factors that affect the disclosure level the most. Our paper deals with public universities, focusing on information disclosed via websites while previous literature has mainly analysed private entities dealing with information disclosed through financial statements.

Keywords: disclosure index; disclosure determinant analysis; university websites; Italy; higher education; information disclosure; research activities; teaching activities. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=65365 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:gbusec:v:16:y:2014:i:4:p:452-471

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Global Business and Economics Review from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().