Required Financial Statement Disclosures: Purposes, Subject, Number, and Trends.

We categorize, summarize, and analyze required financial statement disclosures. We find that the disclosure purposes identified by the FASB are too broad to analyze the disclosure items. Thus, we infer from the disclosures additional purposes and partition the FASB purposes into finer categories. This results in identifying 17 specific purposes belonging to 6 primary ones. We also find: (1) The most frequently required disclosures relate to amounts recognized in the financial statements, particularly to disaggregating them and providing relevant measures other than the measure in the financial statements—disaggregatlon of recognized amounts represents 26 percent of all required disclosures. (2) Six subjects—stockholders' equity, leases, pensions, income taxes, other postretirement employee benefits, and commitments and contingencies—account for 43 pere cent of all required disclosures; five standards-SFAS 13, 87, 88, 106, and 109-account for 28 percent. (3) Few disclosures explicitly provide information on future cash inflows or outflows. (4) Few provide measures of unrecognized items. (5) Disclosure requirements have Increased over time; few have been eliminated. Our list of disclosure purposes provides a framework for standard- setters in determining disclosure to require in new financial reporting standards. Research is needed to investigate whether all disclosure purposes are informative and whether all informative disclosures are required. Although research on a subject-by-subject basis can address these questions, research spanning subject boundaries also is needed. By identifying the subjects requiring disclosures with each purpose, our study provides a framework for designing such research.