Digital Technology Disclosure, Corporate Performance and Sustainability

This study aims to fulfill the significant research gap of lack of studies investigating a link between corporate voluntary digital technology disclosure and corporate performance, and, additionally, this research also aims to provide an alternative outlook on Industry 4.0 readiness assessment by considering corporate voluntary digital technology disclosure. The Signalling Theory accompanied by the Stakeholder Theory addressing the Information Asymmetry Problem, as well as the theory on Industry 4.0 were used to explain the causality mechanism in all the hypothesized relationships between the extent of corporate voluntary digital technology disclosure and market capitalization, while several data analysis methods were employed to quantitively test the hypothesized relationships. The main finding is the positive relationship between the extent of corporate voluntary digital technology disclosure and market capitalization in the fixed-term period. Furthermore, this relationship is more significant for larger companies, than for the smaller ones. Moreover, the effect of the extent of corporate voluntary digital technology disclosure on market capitalization in the fixed-term period is not proxied by such efficiency indicators as Return-on-Asset (ROA) and Labor (Workforce) Productivity. This paper makes several contributions: it emerges the research in the field of corporate voluntary digital technology disclosure; it demonstrates that Internet could be used as the source of corporate voluntary disclosure if the proper data collection technique would be adopted; it shows the role of corporate voluntary digital technology disclosure as the prospective way of Industry 4.0 readiness assessment. This research contains 18 tables, 13 figures, 147 references, and two appendixes.