Abstract:

The Bachelors of Science of Accounting and of Management of the Guarda Polytechnic Institute are interdisciplinary programmes that prepare students for challenging careers in accounting and finance markets as future decision makers. This research focus one perspective of the agency theory that explains consistently, but is a relatively complex way, the disclosure of accounting information contained in the Annual Report. So, further than the classroom and in the advance accounting courses, students must research about real-world employment practices and case studies which through the understanding of the state of the art they build tools to perform reports and get fundamental tools to better comprehensive understanding.

The methodology of the research is divided into two major areas. In the first, it will be conducted a theoretical analysis based in the accounting and corporate law that dedicate their attention to the disclosure of information among listed firms in the capital stock market as literature review (Kothari, 2001; Barth et al., 2001 and Beatti et al., 2004) that is used to teach students. In the second, it will develop an empirical analysis, quantitative and longitudinal study based on manual consultation of the Information Disclosure System (IDS) of the listed firms of the Portuguese Securities Market Commission (PSMC) through case studies which allows students to explore, during the semester, methods and techniques that has been used by listed firms.

The results of the research allow concluding a wide dispersion of information which makes it particularly difficult to identify all the variables and the listed firms included in IDS, as well as, the perception of ethical behaviour of the duty of dissemination of the accounting information. Also, the research evaluate, in detail the 2012 and 2013 years, of the disclosure of information from accounting system provided by the firms listed on the Securities Admitted to Trading on a Regulated Market and the Market without Quotes and Other Entities Issuers as Open Societies in Portugal. The final conclusion is that students get a solid theoretical and practical background in advance accounting, learn to examine the information disclosure made by listed firms and gain the notion of importance of the supervision carried out by the PSMC and listed firms.

In these sense, the main difficulties of students and professors on the process of learning and teaching is that the data released by the authorities of the capital stock market needs several treatments due to specifications not well documented. However, in many cases, it appears that the relevant research is unable to retrieve them, because most of data warehouses are unavailable. To reduce this problem it appears the need of this research to discuss these links between higher education and research.

Keywords:

Accounting Degree, Management Degree, Disclosure, Financial Information Portugal.