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This paper aims to examine the impact of the legal obligation for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting, introduced in 2019 by the Moroccan Capital Market Authority (AMMC), on the environmental disclosure practices of industrial companies listed on the Casablanca Stock Exchange (CSE).

An analysis of the content of the ESG reports of the industrial listed companies on the CSE is carried out over the two years that frame the year of implementation of the AMMC circular, i.e. 2018 and 2020, to analyze the difference in the quality of their environmental disclosures using a conformity criterion based on the Environmental section (N°300) of the “Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)” standards.

The results confirm the presence of a positive effect of the legal obligation for ESG reporting on the quality of environmental reporting of Moroccan industrial listed companies. However, the degree of compliance with the GRI framework remains incomplete.

This study helps to highlight the effectiveness of regulatory measures in improving the disclosure of relevant corporate environmental reporting of listed companies. The study also provides an overview of the progress made in implementing quality environmental reporting standards, specifically the GRI framework, in a developing country, namely, Morocco.

This paper aims to determine whether audit opinions in Morocco, an emerging market, are value relevant to the stock market, through the investigation of the market reaction to the issuance of modified audit opinions (MAOs).

The event study approach is used. The data are derived from the financial reports of listed companies on the Casablanca Stock Exchange over a period of 10 years from 2010 to 2019.

This paper does not find evidence that the market reacts to the issuance of MAOs when grouped together. When partitioning the sample by types, there is an evidence of a stock market reaction to qualified audit opinions and the qualified audit opinions with observation paragraph when they are combined with a negative variation of earnings per share. Examination of the impact of different natures of qualifications shows no consistent results and that the market does not distinguish between natures of qualifications.

These results may be due to the fact that some investors have information about the audit opinion long before it is made public, due to privileged access to audit opinions, or that investors underestimate audit opinions relative to other financial indicators.

This study contributes to the existing literature by investigating an emerging market, not previously tested, after the introduction of several regulatory reforms in Moroccan market aimed at enhancing transparency in financial reporting. It refines the market reaction models used in previous studies by using both ordinary least squares and the Scholes–Williams techniques that correct for the effect of thin trading on the market index. In addition, special attention is given to studying the market reaction to each type of MAOs and to each natures of qualifications.