Rodrigo de Souza Gonçalves

Social Disclosure e Custo de Capital Próprio em Companhias Abertas no Brasil

This study aims to analyze the relationship between the level of social disclosure and the cost of equity in public companies in Brazil. The hypothesis is that external social programs promoted or supported by a company increase the organizations reputation, compensate for externalities and bring economic benefits through the negative relationship with the cost of equity. To test this hypothesis, social responsibility reports of 83 companies listed on the Sao Paulo Stock, Mercantile and Futures Exchanges (Bolsa de Valores, Mercadorias e Futuros de Sao Paulo - BM) from the period 2005-2009 were collected and analyzed. A composite index of 13 indicators was used to evaluate the social disclosure level of the companies analyzed. The cost of equity was risk-adjusted using the capital asset-pricing model (CAPM) and regression tested using panel data with cross-sectional fixed effects. The results show a negative relationship between the cost of equity and level of social disclosure, indicating that the Brazilian stock market has a semi-strong form of market efficiency.

O olhar dos conselheiros de saúde sobre os relatórios de prestação de contas no município de Natal (Rio Grande do Norte), Brasil

Se os conselhos forem analisados como organizacao que combina recursos e procura deliberadamente realizar um conjunto de objetivos, a avaliacao de sua eficacia, e nao de sua efetividade, estara centrada na capacidade de realizacao de objetivos definidos pelos seus membros. No Brasil a partir da Lei No 8142/90, os conselhos de saude passaram a deliberar assuntos ligados a saude, tornando-se pratica constante. Este artigo analisa os resultados de pesquisa qualitativa realizada sobre o desempenho do Conselho Municipal de Saude de Natal (CMS) a partir de informacoes de natureza economico-financeira prestadas pela Secretaria Municipal de Saude (SMS). De acordo com os resultados, os conselheiros tem baixo grau de compreensao sobre as informacoes de natureza economico-financeiras, dado que ocorre uma evidenciacao incompleta por parte da SMS ao CMS, o que implica no fato de o CMS nao ter a oportunidade de estabelecer maiores inferencias sobre a eficiencia da destinacao dos recursos. Dessa forma, aumenta a dificuldade do exercicio de controle por parte dos conselheiros uma vez que a informacao de modo sintetico impossibilita dentre outras inferencias o confronto entre o que foi previsto no orcamento e o que foi efetivamente realizado.

Social disclosure: up to where should the regulation go?

This study analysed whether the corporate governance requirements established by the stock exchanges contribute to the voluntary disclosure of the resources allocated for social projects. For this goal, an index of social disclosure was developed, which made it possible to assess the quality of the information on external social projects voluntarily published by the listed companies. Next, sample information of the 60 listed Brazilian companies was collected in BOVESPA and/or in NYSE, which, using the proposed index, allowed for the classification of the companies and the search for relations with their governance practices.

CONVERGÊNCIA INTERNACIONAL: ANÁLISE DA RELAÇÃO ENTRE O PROCESSO NORMATIVO E A COMPOSIÇÃO DOS MEMBROS DO IASB

The IASB, International Accounting organization that leads the convergence of accounting standards, suffers criticism ranging from the creation and formation until the regulatory process itself. Such criticism seek to bring the idea that drives in the preparation of accounting standards and changes end up following a schedule in accordance with the interests of the major countries that finance the organization, as well as their sponsoring companies. Accordingly, the objective of this study is to analyze the accounting standards that have a higher level of inconsistencies between local and international GAAP and assess whether they have changed due to geographic participation of members of the organization. Therefore, it was used as the search basis the GAAP Convergence 2001, which shows the differences between the local and international standards from 60 countries worldwide. It was drawn, then, a database containing such information, updated until 2010, besides a database containing the historical composition of the IASB members for the same period. The rules that were modified by IFRS were also included and the analyzes were performed in a qualitative way. The results show that there is no evidence of loss of neutrality from the participation of the IASB members, taking as a point that the continents with the highest representation does not have a higher level of standards with differences modified by the body through the IFRS, although these continents show a higher amount of local regulatory differences when compared with the IAS and IFRS. Based on the results, it can be inferred that the IASB regulatory process seeks to reduce the differences globally, bringing a set of standards based on the theoretical framework of accounting and which may be applied in a general way, without any differentiation by the organization to the reduction of differences in specific continents. As a suggestion, future research may deal with countries individually and their stages in the convergence process, as well as a possible identification, more specifically, in the standards development process, ensuring that the comments received through the Comment Letters to the IASB have some work on when processed by the body.

A Social Disclosure Index for Assessing Social Programmes in Brazilian Listed Firms

This study is aimed at developing and validating an index designed to measure the level of social disclosure of external social programmes implemented by firms listed on the Brazilian stock market. Based on Ramanathan (1976), Haydel (1989) and Hammond and Miles (2004), the index of social disclosure is composed of thirteen items distributed in the following dimensions: past information, prospective actions, and accessibility. For validating such an index the following stages were implemented: (a) pre-test, (b) analysis by referees, (c) exploratory factor analysis, (d) Cronbach’s alpha test, and (e) final validation. The sample is composed of 83 Brazilian firms listed on the Brazilian Stock Exchange from 2005 to 2009. The index presented robustness in all the validation stages. It was found that size, industry sector, internationalisation, auditing and listing of social responsible investment funds are decisive factors for increasing the level of social disclosure. The originality of the paper is based on: (a) the construction of a social disclosure index validated and tested in Brazilian listed firms is liable to replication in future research, (b) the utilization of a representative sample of firms listed on an important emerging stock market scarcely explored in social disclosure research. The social disclosure index developed can be useful to analysts and investors assessing listed firms, as well as to financial-market regulators defining policies applicable to the disclosure of corporate social information, both in emerging and developed markets.

Conselhos de saúde e controle social: um estudo comparativo dos relatórios de prestação de contas das Secretarias Estaduais de Saúde

The exercise of social control is one of the democratic practices applied to the Brazilian national healthcare system. Different mechanisms were provided to this end, among which are the accountability reports. These reports are prepared by the Healthcare Secretariats and submitted to deliberation of their respective Healthcare Councils, in order to ensure transparency in public actions. This article discusses a comparative analysis of the accountability reports from different State Healthcare Secretariats, as a mean of publicizing this type of information. A survey of qualitative nature was conducted on documents which covered the years 2008 and 2009 for the following states: Parana, Santa Catarina, Rio Grande do Sul, Espirito Santo and Rio de Janeiro. The results suggest that, although the State Secretariats disclose most of the variables evaluated, Healthcare Councils do not explicit the public management analysis on their own statements. This suggests that the evaluation process for this type of information needs to be improved with regards to the way it is interpreted and the recommendations it makes to improve public healthcare policies. Further issues to be addressed are: defining priorities when applying funds and establishing goals and objectives, since these do not yet feature in most of the accountability reports issued by the States. Future research should seek to establish if the scale of the involvement of the healthcare councils actually leads to improved results in their accountability reports.

SOCIAL DISCLOSURE OF BRAZILIAN PUBLICLY-TRADED COMPANIES: A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF ACTIONS IN EXTERNAL SOCIAL PROGRAMMES FROM 2005 TO 2009

This paper presents assessment results of the socia l disclosure level of Brazilian publiclytraded companies regarding the disclosure of extern al social projects. Social programs have among other aims the reduction of the negative impa ct c used by company’s operating activities (JENSEN et al., 1972). This research has a qualitative nature and uses content analysis as a technique for data analysis. Reports f 83 Brazilian companies listed in BM&FBovespa with the highest level of stock liquidi ty in the period from 2005 to 2009 were analysed. The analysed categories (past information , prospection of future actions, and accessibility) indicate that being listed in foreig n stock exchanges and in social responsible funds are the most important characteristics to hig her and better levels of social disclosure. It is also found that companies considered as having h gher levels of environmental impact are those which present higher levels of social disclos ure when compared with the other companies. Besides these factors, it is observed th at there is, in general, an evolution of the level of disclosure in the period, since the compan ies considered as having high levels of social disclosure increased from 21% in 2005 (17 co mpanies) to 27% in 2009 (22 companies). This trend demonstrates the importance of such information, as well as these companies’ concern in providing more transparency o f their actions in social programs.