Abstract

Firm’s debt providers take the cost of debt as their compensation for asymmetry information they encountered. Human resource disclosure is one of the vital information needed by the firm’s creditor to ensure that responsible and qualified individuals manage their funds. The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent of human resource disclosure and identify their association with the cost of debt in annual reports of Indonesian listed firms. This research is conducted using 650 firm-year observations of Indonesian listed firms from all industries, except the financial industry from 2014 to 2015. A cross-sectional ordinary least square (OLS) is used to test the research hypotheses. Consistent with expectation, we found that human resources disclosure has a negative association with the cost of debt. We also document that creditors perceived all of the human resources disclosure section must be integrated, not separately disclosed. Furthermore, the research results in sub-samples that we found that only in small-sized firms and firms that have low leverage, which is experiencing the beneficiaries of human resources disclosure in the context of lowering the cost of debt. These results imply that Indonesia’s creditor perceived a firm’s capital which its majority component from internal is a less risky investment; therefore, they impose a lower cost of debt. Interestingly, Indonesia’s creditor also has serious concern about the development of small firms by providing a low cost of debt. Proxy of human resource disclosure only based on annual report disclosure, not considering the firm official website and firm social media.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)342-355
Number of pages14
JournalPolish Journal of Management Studies
Volume21
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2020

Keywords

  • Cost of debt
  • Human disclosure index
  • Non-financial disclosure

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'A quest to minimize cost of debt by utilizing human resources disclosure'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this