An Analysis of Lease Disclosures by Australian Companies

Abstract

From 1964 to 1980 there was a twenty‐fold increase in the extent to which the average Australian company resorted to lease finance. Lease disclosure by lessees was voluntary throughout this period, yet we observe that, by 1979, three out of four lessee companies had begun to disclose their lease commitments. Our study sought an answer to the question: what factors influenced Australian lessees, in their decision whether or not to disclose lease commitments in their annual reports? In a wider sense, we use this issue to probe further our power to explain accounting policy choice, particularly in situations, such as in Australia, where a small population restricts our ability to observe some aspects of the economic and political process. Based on a univariate and multivariate tests, we infer from our study that the relative frequency of voluntary disclosure by lessees was related to (a) industry, (b) firm size and (c) whether the lessee was a subsidiary company of a foreign parent; was only weakly related to (d) whether the lessee entered the Australian Institute of Management good reporting award; and was unrelated to (e) the identity of the lessee's audit firm (f) the existence of bonus scheme tied to reported profit and (g) the relative risk of the firm.