Disclosure of university websites. Evidence from Italian data

Universities are required to gain a competitive advantage in recruiting students and obtaining funds. The Bologna Declaration has emphasised this process, highlighting both the need to improve quality as well as the importance of providing information to stakeholders. The paper focuses on the information requirements, with the aim of analysing the disclosure of information by Italian universities through their websites. We have calculated both a global disclosure index and different partial disclosure indices relating to the areas of interest of the main stakeholders: the study reveals that Italian universities achieve a satisfactory rate in disclosing information relating to research and teaching activities. We have also performed a disclosure determinant analysis in order to investigate the reasons why some universities disclose more or less information than others: complexity and social responsibility are the factors that affect the disclosure level the most. Our paper deals with public universities, focusing on information disclosed via websites while previous literature has mainly analysed private entities dealing with information disclosed through financial statements.