Digital Accounting Disclosure and Market Valuation of Listed Non-Financial Companies in Nigeria

The increasing use of digital technologies in accounting has changed not only how financial information is generated but also how companies communicate the quality and reliability of their reporting processes to capital-market participants. This study examines the relationship between digital accounting disclosure and market valuation of listed non-financial companies in Nigeria, focusing on real-time financial reporting disclosure, automated tax reporting disclosure and automated internal control disclosure. The study adopts an ex-post facto design and uses archival information from annual reports and corporate disclosures of 66 listed non-financial companies over 2016–2025. Market valuation is proxied by market capitalization growth, while firm size, measured as the natural logarithm of total assets, is included as a control variable. Disclosure indices are constructed from corporate reports. The reduced model was re-estimated from the underlying firm-year observations rather than transferring coefficients from the original seven variable model. Robust ordinary least squares estimates based on 538 complete observations show positive but statistically insignificant coefficients for real-time financial reporting disclosure (β = 0.515; p = .333), automated tax reporting disclosure (β = 0.889; p = .264), and automated internal control disclosure (β = 1.216; p = .492). The findings suggest that disclosure of these technologies, by itself, did not provide sufficiently strong incremental information to explain short-term market capitalization growth during the study period. The study concludes that the valuation relevance of digital accounting disclosure may depend on the credibility, depth and usefulness of the information communicated rather than disclosure presence alone.