Impact of Executives’ Profile on the Extent of Voluntary Financial Disclosure: The Case of Tunisian Companies

Salma Damak-Ayadi () and Emna Klibi
Additional contact information
Salma Damak-Ayadi: IHEC Carthage, University of Carthage, LIGUE, Tunisia
Emna Klibi: College of Business Administration, University of Dammam, Saudi Arabia

Journal of Accounting and Management Information Systems, 2015, vol. 14, issue 4, 655-684

Abstract: The main purpose of this paper is to examine how important the profile of manager is to voluntary financial disclosure in the Tunisian emerging market. We mobilize the upper echelon theory which suggests that human factors may affect firm strategy and performance. We investigate the characteristics of voluntary financial disclosure in Tunisia which has incurred important changes during recent years. Tunisia is an African developing country of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) that tends to improve the quality of governance and more specifically of the voluntary disclosure to attract foreign investors. However, the voluntary disclosure of information is not yet strictly regulated and many firms are still unwilling to disclosure voluntary information in their annual reports. The needs of the external users of annuals reports are constantly growing as well. In addition, after the globalization of financial market, Tunisian legislator encourage listed companies to be more transparent to satisfy the need of different users and to attract international investors. This exploratory study proposes the existence of a relationship between manager profile and the extent of voluntary financial disclosure. We expect that the profile of managers matters for firms’ disclosure decision. After applying a linear regression using information from the annual reports of 32 Tunisian companies during the years 2008-2009, results show that the age of manager has a particularly significant effect on the extent of voluntary financial disclosure.

Keywords: Voluntary financial disclosure; manager profile; annual reports; Tunisian context (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: M41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://online-cig.ase.ro/RePEc/ami/articles/14_4_3.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ami:journl:v:14:y:2015:i:4:p:655-684

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Accounting and Management Information Systems from Faculty of Accounting and Management Information Systems, The Bucharest University of Economic Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Cristina Tartavulea ().