The Enron collapse in 2001 has resulted in an increasing attention to corporate governance. Even in Sweden, some scandals have occurred, for example Skandia, ABB, Trustor; a parallel could be drawn, implying that these scandals have resulted in increased attention to corporate governance. Corporate governance concerns the relationship between a corporation’s management, board of directors, shareholders and other stakeholders. The problems with the relationship between managers and share-holders are referred to as the principle-agent problem. The increase in corporate governance disclosure can be seen as a way by the corporations to regain the trust from the shareholders. Can agency theory be used to explain why some corporation disclose more corporate governance information than others?

The purpose with this master thesis is, with starting point in agency theory, to contribute to the understanding of which factors that influence corporations to disclose corporate governance information in the annual reports.

For this thesis, a quantitative research has been performed. Annual reports from corporations listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange have been examined, to be able to develop a corporate governance disclosure index and to measure 15 characteristics, derived from the agency theory and two control variables. The data was analysed in SPSS , using both linear and multiple regressions.

The analysis showed that role duality actually measured if a corporation had a foreign parent company and corporations listed on the O-list other on Stockholm Stock Exchange served as proxies for smaller corporations. Therefore, it was possible to con-clude that corporations were influenced by the origin of the parent company and the size of the corporation to disclose corporate governance information. Another conclusion was that corporate governance characteristics derived from agency theory is not appropriate when trying to find factors that influence corporations to disclose corporate governance information. Nevertheless, this does not mean that it is inappropriate to take the starting point in the agency theory.