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The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of corporate governance attributes of listed Egyptian companies on the propensity (adoption) and comprehensiveness (quality) of corporate internet reporting (CIR) practices.

This study uses archival data from the largest (top) 100 listed companies on the Egyptian Stock Exchange (EGX 100). Corporate governance attributes are captured by ownership structure (free float, managerial ownership, government ownership) and board of directors' structure (board size, board independence, CEO‐chair duality). Empirical models are used to estimate the effects of these attributes on the propensity, content, presentation, and overall comprehensiveness of CIR.

The results of this study indicate mixed effects of governance attributes on the choice to adopt CIR and its quality. The results from the Binary Logistic Regression suggest that Egyptian companies with greater (less) ownership dispersion, managerial ownership, governmental ownership, and (board independence) are more likely to adopt CIR. On the other hand – and as revealed by the seemingly unrelated regressions – among CIR companies those with greater (less) ownership dispersion, board size (governmental ownership), and (board independence) have more comprehensive CIR.

This study extends the relatively limited research on the effects of corporate governance and CIR in emerging markets. The study contributes to this literature by demonstrating how corporate governance attributes affects the choice to adopt CIR disclosure practices and the level of its quality in an emerging market such as Egypt.

This exploratory study aims to provide preliminary evidence regarding the non-audit committee corporate governance determinants of audit committee functionality.

The study is based on archival accounting, corporate governance data, and interviews of subjects of the top 100 companies listed on the Egyptian Stock Exchange (EGX100). A logistic regression is used to identify the non-audit committee governance attributes that affect the likelihood of of having a functional audit committee.

Board size and board independence, (CEO-chairman duality) are positively (negatively) related to audit committee functionality, suggesting complementary governance relations. On the other hand, the authors document a negative relation between auditor type (Big4) and audit committee functionality indicating a substitutive governance effect.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study that explores the actual functioning of audit committees in Egypt beyond mere regulatory requirements. The study highlights the importance of assuring that the “spirit” of corporate governance laws and regulations is adhered to rather than the mere compliance with their “letter”.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of board structure on voluntary corporate disclosure via social media among the top 150 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange.

A disclosure index comprising of a set of items that encompass two facets of disclosure, namely corporate disclosure via social networks and social media sites, is developed and used. Binary logistic regression is used to test the research hypotheses.

The results of this study reveal the underlying relations between board composition and control variables as the determining factors of corporate disclosure, i.e. board size, board activism, board independence and board diversity (gender and ethnicity). The gender of the board can affect the corporate disclosure via a social network. The results of this study indicate that an increase in the number of female in the board members leads to higher corporate disclosure using social network. Moreover, firm size has a positive effect on corporate disclosure indicating that large firms tend to disclose more information on their websites and social networks.

The paper provides new insights into the role played by the non-executive female directors in monitoring and controlling managerial processes related to corporate disclosure using social media.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that examines the role of board structure in monitoring and controlling management decisions and managerial processes in the area of corporate disclosure via social media.

The authors examine the association between internal control quality (ICQ) and voluntary disclosure and test whether chief executive officer (CEO) duality, as a proxy for CEO structural power, moderates such a relationship in an emerging market (Egypt).

ICQ is measured using a survey of external auditors, while a content analysis approach is used to measure the level of voluntary disclosure in annual reports.

Based on a sample of 512 firm-year observations over the period of 2007–2014, the authors document that ICQ is positively and significantly associated with voluntary disclosure, suggesting that better controls improve corporate reporting policy. In addition, CEO duality moderates the association between ICQ and voluntary disclosure since this positive relationship association becomes insignificant for companies characterised by CEO duality. These results remain stable after controlling for endogeneity (self-selection problem), political instability and industry characteristics.

The findings of the study provide preliminary evidence on the association between ICQ and voluntary disclosure, and how CEO structural power may affect this association. Future empirical investigations may extend this work to cover the relationship between ICQ and other attributes of corporate transparency including earnings quality and accounting conservatism.

The findings highlight the need for Egyptian regulators to enact new rules obliging firms to communicate information about ICQ or charging auditors to report information about firm's ICQ in their reports. The results also alert policymakers about the adverse effect of combined leadership structure (CEO duality) since it mitigates the positive impact of ICQ on voluntary disclosure.

The authors contribute to internal control literature by exploring the association between ICQ and voluntary disclosure on an emergent unregulated market with respect to internal control disclosure. They also highlight how CEO duality, as a proxy for CEO power, mitigates the beneficial effect of ICQ on corporate reporting policy on the Egyptian stock exchange (EGX).

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of voluntary disclosure, ownership structure attributes and timely disclosure on cost of equity capital in the emerging Egyptian capital market.

A content analysis of annual reports is used to measure the extent of voluntary disclosure. Earnings announcement lag (EAL) is used to measure the quality of voluntary disclosure (i.e. timely disclosure). Finally, the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) framework is used to estimate cost of equity capital.

The authors find a negative relationship between the level of voluntary disclosure and cost of equity capital. More specifically, the authors document that this association is strongly significant under high ownership dispersion, low government ownership and shorter EAL. Finally, EAL is positively associated with cost of equity capital.

The authors use the CAPM framework as a proxy for the cost of equity since forecasted earnings per share are not communicated by financial analysts in the Egyptian Stock Exchange.

The findings demonstrate for managers that the increased levels of voluntary and timely disclosure reduce the cost of external finance and improve the marketability of firms’ equities, which may directly impact growth opportunities especially when information is communicated to investors in a timely fashion. For regulators, it provides evidence that high government ownership reduces the value relevance of voluntary disclosure among investors, while free float as a proxy for high ownership dispersion improves it.

The findings show that corporate disclosure policy depends more on the managers’ incentives to provide informative annual reports than on standards and regulations. The study also represents a first attempt that demonstrates how ownership structure and timely disclosure influence the relationship between disclosure and cost of equity capital.

The effect of culture, through the accounting values of conservatism and secrecy, on accounting judgments is an area of research extensively studied in developed countries. However, little research has focused on this issue in developing countries, specifically Arab countries. Thus, this study aims to fill this gap by investigating the impact of the combined effect of the culture/accounting dimensions on the interpretation of the probability expressions used in the international accounting standards/international financial reporting standards (IFRSs) in two North African/Arab countries: Tunisia and Egypt.

In the first place, this study determines Hofstede’s cultural index scores for Tunisia, ignored in his original model and updates those related to Egypt, which provides a more relevant understanding of the cultural effect. Then, the study relies on the Hofstede/Gray cultural accounting model to examine the extent to which the accounting values of conservatism and secrecy may affect the recognition of the increase and the decrease of income and the disclosure of this information in the financial statements by postgraduate accounting student in both countries.

The results provide evidence of the generalizability of Gray’s conservatism hypothesis in the North African/Arab countries (i.e. Tunisia and Egypt), at least in the context of income recognition. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that culture, through its influence on the accounting value of secrecy, affects the interpretation of probability expressions used in the IFRSs to establish disclosures.

This study calls for more attention from the standard setters to provide further guidance related to the consistent and accurate numerical value that needs to be assigned to the probability expressions to reduce the ambiguity related to their interpretation. The international accounting standards board (IASB) should pay greater attention to the use of vague probability expressions in developing the IFRSs to promote the true comparability of financial reporting worldwide. Like with any research, this study implies certain limitations specifically related to the sample selection, a sample size, which may affect the generalizability of the results. Thus, future research may rely on a larger sample combining and cover other cultural areas.

The results of this study may give insights into the practical issues faced by the accounting practitioners and which are related to the interpretation and the application of the IFRS including probability expressions. This may trigger their attention toward this issue to reduce the occurrence of these expressions in the revised and newly released standards to guarantee homogeneous financial reporting practices across countries and enhance the IASB’s objective of international accounting harmonization.

This study might be the first one that investigates the issue of the IFRS interpretation in two North African and Arab countries: Tunisia and Egypt. It also provides an original investigation of the cultural effect on accounting judgments based on the actualized Hofstede’s cultural indexes, especially for Tunisia which is ignored in the original country classification.

This study aims to examine the impact of internal corporate governance and audit quality on the level of COVID-19 disclosure in Egypt.

The authors use manual content analysis to measure levels of COVID-19 disclosure in the narrative sections of annual reports. The authors analyze all companies listed on the Egyptian Stock Exchange over 2020–2021. The authors use different regression models to test the research hypotheses.

The analysis adds to the literature in two crucial respects. First, it provides a measure for COVID-19 disclosure in Egypt. Second, it provides evidence that governance mechanisms (board diversity, audit committee [AC] independence), auditor type and audit opinion affect the level of COVID-19 disclosure. The higher level of COVID-19 disclosure is associated with firms with more female directors on the board, being audited by one of the big four audit firms and receiving standard clean audit opinion. While the inexistence of an AC and more executives on the AC negatively affect COVID-19 disclosure levels.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the only paper that examines COVID-19 disclosure in the Egyptian context. It is also the first paper that provides evidence on the impact of internal governance and audit quality on COVID-19 disclosure.

This paper aims to examine the impact of audit-related attributes and regulatory reforms on timely disclosure as proxied by audit report lag (ARL) in an emerging market setting, namely, Egypt.

The paper used the balanced panel data of 372 firm-years observations of the most actively traded companies on the Egyptian Stock Exchange over the period from 2007 to 2010. The study measures the dependent variable of ARL as the number of days between the client’s fiscal year-end and the audit report.

Multivariate analysis indicates that audit committee activity (proxy for regulatory reforms) and external auditor type (proxy for audit-related attributes) contribute significantly to the reduction of ARL and increase disclosure timeliness. Furthermore, the paper found that ARL witnessed a slight decrease following the adoption of the new Egyptian Standards on Auditing (ESA). Finally, the paper’s findings show that industry types moderate the relationship between ARL and several audit-related variables and corporate governance attributes.

The results may have policy implications for both regulators and investors. For instance, policymakers in Egypt can enact new rules to reduce the Chief Executive Officer duality and establish the minimum required number of audit committee meetings to improve transparency level and, thus, increase disclosure timeliness. Besides, if future regulations aiming to increase disclosure timeliness are intended by Egyptian regulators, this paper’s findings suggest that this may have implications for the audit market because the Big Four audit firms will be more able to meet shorter audit delays.

The empirical evidence provided in this study further enhances the understanding of timely disclosure in Egypt which represents one of the leading emerging markets in the Middle East and North Africa region.

Previous works assessing the determinants of banks’ risk disclosure in emerging economies focused on one aspect of risk reporting such as market risk disclosure or operational risk disclosure. While banks’ transparency about other major risk types (e.g. capital adequacy, liquidity risk…) is important for both market discipline and for their financial stability, no previous research has tried to discuss their determinants for Islamic banks. This paper aims to fill the gap by assessing the effects of deposits structure and ownership concentration on risk disclosure for Islamic banks.

The authors based on a sample of 71 Islamic banks operating in 12 emerging economies and observed over the period 2009–2014. The authors used a risk disclosure index covering nine dimensions, and the authors used both generalized least squares (GLS) regression and generalized method of moments (GMMs) as econometric tools.

The findings suggests that the level of risk disclosure is lower for Islamic banks with higher ownership concentration, leveraged bank, listed banks and Islamic banks. However, risk disclosure is higher for Islamic banks with higher concentration of profit sharing investment account (PSIA) and higher foreign ownership, large Islamic banks, aged banks, Islamic banks operating in country with higher country transparency index, positively correlated to gross domestic products and Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) adoption. By disaggregating total risk disclosure into the nine sub-categories, the authors are able to specify, also, the components of risk disclosure impacted by various determinants.

This paper’s findings are subject, also, to a number of limitations. First, there was manual scoring of annual reports (subjectivity). Second, while some items might have higher information content or be more useful than others for users of Islamic banks’ annual reports, no weighting is assigned to items. Third, the research focuses exclusively on the 12 countries and excludes the other Middle East, Southeast Asia and Far East countries where ownership structure and deposits structure might affect risk disclosure differently.

The findings suggest many policy implications. First, regulators have to improve corporate governance mechanisms in Islamic banking system through the optimization of ownership structure (dispersed ownership) to promote transparency and disclosure. Second, regulators and policymakers should revise guidelines in the main purpose to protect PSIAs holders (considered as minor shareholders without voting power) through promoting disclosure and transparency. Third, the findings can be useful for many international supervisory bodies such as the IFSB and AAOIFI to evaluate transparency and disclosure standards.

The authors explore the level and determinants of compliance with Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institution’s (AAOIFI) financial and governance standards by Islamic banks (IBs).

The sample consists of 43 IBs across eight countries. The authors use ordinary least squares regression analyses to examine the impact of bank-specific characteristics and corporate governance (CG) mechanisms concerned with Board of Directors (BOD) and Sharia Supervisory Board (SSB) on the levels of compliance with AAOIFI standards.

The paper finds that the average compliance level based on AAOIFI standards concerning the SSB is 68 per cent; corporate social responsibility (CSR) is 27 per cent; and presentation of financial statements (FSs) is 73 per cent. The aggregate disclosure based on the three indices is 56 per cent. The analysis also shows that size, existing Sharia-auditing department, age and CG of SSB are the main determinants of compliance levels.

The determinants of compliance with AAOIFI standards for IBs around the world have not been explored before, and therefore, this paper is the first of its kind to this issue.