Abstract

Universities are institutions that require social control, with an adequate disclosure of information. The latter permits to reduce the asymmetry of information anda greater organizational transparency, among other effects. The characteristics of universities, such as size; time of the institutions in the university system; ownership; and the capacity to investigate, would help explain different levels of disclosure. Thus, the objective of this research is to determine the relationship between characteristics of Latin American universities and the disclosure of information from the perspective of agency theory and institutional theory. An index is proposed to measure the level of disclosure of information of 219 Latin American universities. Nonparametric test and correlation analysis are applied to test the hypotheses. Results indicate that there is a low level of disclosure, and it is concluded that the characteristics of the universities explain different levels of the index, which is consistent with the theory.