The impact of board characteristics on the disclosure of the forward-looking information : evidence from the Egyptian stock market

Abstract EN

Purpose - The paper aims to empirically test the impact of the corpo rate governance mechanisms related to the board characteristics on the forward-looking disclosures of companies listed in the Egyptian stock market.

Design/methodology/approach- This study used Board size, Board independence, Board CEO duality, and gender diversity as measures for corporate governance mechanism in relation to the board charac teristics.

Forward looking disclosures were investigated using a check list that included 24 items distributed over 4 categories of disclosure (1- environment around the company, 2- Goals, strategies and busi ness policies, 3- organization, management and corporate structure and 4- Financial issues) through a content analysis where a score was calculated by adding the sum of disclosed items in the company‟s an nual report and then divide them by the total number of items.

Two control variables were used: firm size which was measured by the nat ural logarithm of total assets and auditor type which is a dummy vari able taking a value of 0 for non-Big 4 audit firms and 1 for Big 4).

The sample included the most active 30 companies (EGX30) in the Egyptian stock exchange market covering the period from 2010 till 2017.

Data were analyzed using regression analysis.