PANDEMIC IMPACTS:

FACTORS EXPLAINING VOLUNTARY DISCLOSURE IN THE CONTEXT OF COVID-19.

Abstract

The COVID-19 has affected several economic sectors and its impacts are still considered uncertain. In this sense, the Securities and Exchange Commission of Brazil (SEC) released the Circular Letter SEC/SNC/SEP 02/20 with guidelines for Brazilian publicly traded companies to disclose in their relevant facts, the possible impacts of the pandemic on their activities. This study sought to identify what motivated the publicly traded companies listed in B3 to voluntary disclosure information about pandemic. To this end, the relevant facts disclosed by the companies about COVID-19 were manually collected in the period from 01/01/2020 to 08/31/2020. The other information needed for the study were obtained through the CAPITAL IQ database Among the 356 publicly traded Brazilian companies selected, only 282 had desirable information to carry out the study. In this sense, nine hypotheses were formulated to explain the voluntary disclosure by the analyzed companies, which were tested through statistical analysis, univariate and multivariate, using the logistic regression method with the support of the software “Stata 15”. The hypotheses encompass individual information for each company, being them: audit, controlling shareholder, sector, size, internationalization, corporate governance, indebtedness, and profitability. The sector hypothesis presents itself as a differential in the study, since according to the Ministry of Economy, some sectors were more impacted than others during the pandemic. The results obtained through multivariate analysis show that the variables sector, which refer to the most impacted sectors by the pandemic, size and profitability (ROA) were to significant to explain voluntary disclosure in the pandemic. The main contribution of the study consists in the evidencing variables that explain the voluntary disclosure. However, the fact of being placed on an atypical moment that generated a global social and economic crisis contributes to make the work more relevant.