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ingle medium-sized public company (see L&T,
1975a, 1975b, 1976). They proceeded to an interview-based study of 301
shareholders in one of the UK’s largest companies (L&T, 1977). There
were few significant diVerences in the findings of the two types of study.
One remarkable finding of both of their studies was that many parts of
the annual report were neither well read nor well understood by private
shareholders. Although Briston (1977) raises some questions regarding
the methodologies of L&T (specifically the measurement of shareholder
understanding in their 1977 study), he is generally in agreement with their
criticismof the adequacy of corporate reports in communicating information
to the private shareholder and to the market. It should be noted that,
although Briston’s article contains some errors in the interpretation of L&T’s
findings (L&T, 1978, p. 295), it is valuable because it contains brief
descriptions of a number of other studies between 1959–1976 into private
shareholders’ readership of corporate information.
A further review of shareholder surveys is provided by Hines (1982),
who summarizes the results of 12 shareholder surveys conducted between
1971–1979, including the earlier L&T study. The populations sampled, the
sample sizes, usable response rates and the locality of individuals sampled
were diVerent but some of the results were ‘remarkably consistent’ (Hines,
1982, p. 297). For example, all of the surveys reviewed suggest that the
chairman’s report is the most widely read section of the annual report and
that, of the financial statements, the profit and loss account is considered
to be the most important for investment decision-making purposes.
More recently, Epstein & Pava (1993) have reviewed previous (mainly
US) studies. They presented the findings of their own questionnaire-basedthe corporate report and the private shareholder 249
survey of 2,359 shareholders in US listed companies, and compared their
results with those from an earlier study, finding that (pp. xii–xiii):
· Shareholders are now less interested in speculative gains.
· Shareholders have become more self-reliant and now rely less on stock-
brokers.
· Shareholders believe that the annual report is more useful than they did
in 1973.
· Profit statements are not so widely read as they used to be.
· The auditors’ report is considered to be more important than it used to
be.
· Management discussion and analysis (the US equivalent of the ASB’s
OFR) is not perceived as being very useful.
· Some correlation between shareholders’ sophistication and their per-
ceptions of the usefulness of the annual report is noted (in contrast to
the earlier study which found no such correlation).
· Shareholders want auditors to expand the scope of their work.
· Shareholders want more understandable and more relevant disclosures
to be made in the annual report.
A replication of the above approach (Anderson & Epstein, 1995), using a
similar sized sample, extracted from the population of investors in four
major Australian companies, resulted in a much higher response rate (436
responses from 2,359 mailings). Although there are a number of similarities
with the results of the US studies, their findings include:
· Investors rely more heavi本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。