Are HEIs’ Intellectual Capital Disclosures Consistent with the Sustainability Integrated Reporting Trend?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate intellectual capital (IC) disclosure levels in higher education institutions (HEIs), using a comprehensive disclosure checklist which combines a mainstream IC theoretical framework and conceptual delineations from the Integrated Reporting (IR) Framework. The paper employs content analysis on reporting sets from a sample of 50 top public HEIs from the ARWU Shanghai Ranking. The authors determine disclosure indices using three layers of IC disclosure, derived from matching the two frameworks (theoretical for IC and conceptual for IR). Within the sample, the amount of information disclosed concerning IC (using the comprehensive checklist) is close over half of the information embedded in the benchmark model. Also, the mainstream elements from the IC theoretical framework emerging from the literature are more consolidated within the reporting set than the newer disclosure elements from the IR model. This research brings further development of an IC disclosure assessment framework, by combining the existing theoretical framework refined in the literature with delineations and extensions of IR (conducting the assessment through a different lens). Within the paper, the test is conducted using the IC disclosure assessment model on public universities, but the methodology can be replicated on other samples (either on private HEIs or on other types of reporting organizations).