افشای لحن و عملکرد مالی: شواهدی از مصر Tone disclosure and financial performance: evidence from Egypt

1. Introduction The goal of our paper is to examine the impact of financial performance (FP) on tone disclosure (TD). We also examine the impact of TD on FP. Although the association between disclosure and firm performance has received major interests in accounting research, the findings are always mixed (Baek et al., 2004). In addition, none of prior research has examined the bidirectional relationship between TD and FP in developing countries, particularly in Egypt. We are motivated to focus on the Egyptian context for several reasons. One reason is the rapid growth of Egypt as an emerging economy with noteworthy foreign investment potential (Elsayed and Hoque, 2010). Egypt has a diverse financial reporting environment that might affect initial disclosure requirements differently. According to Gray’s (1988) model, accounting measures and disclosures in Egypt will tend to be more conservative and less transparent. There is a need for Egypt to raise capital and promote confidence as well as take stakeholders into consideration. The Egyptian environment has been dynamic, growing through different economic and political systems that arguably affected accounting disclosure practices. Egypt is one of the countries that was affected by the Arab Spring based on the 25 January revolution. Hence, Egypt provides an opportunity for empirical research to gain insights into the impacts of political crisis regarding the extent of disclosure. Moreover, Egypt is used as an example of a major developing economy in the Middle East and North Africa regions, which was generally overlooked in prior research (Ebrahim and Abdel Fattah, 2015). Although prior research has extensively analysed the impact of TD on FP and stock price (Hutton et al., 2003), this paper provides evidence of the same association and the reverse relationship: FP affects TD. Using a sample of 105 Egyptian listed firms during 2011-2013, we found evidence that good news disclosure is positively associated with firms’ FP, suggesting that Egyptian firms that report more positive news achieve a higher FP. Our result supports the argument TD contains value relevant information. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 reviews the theoretical and empirical literature and develops the research hypotheses; Section 3 presents the research design; Section 4 presents the empirical results; and Section 6 concludes.