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This study aims to examine the effects of firms’ accounting disclosure policies on stock price synchronicity and stock crash risk, using a sample including 13 emerging markets. Furthermore, this research investigates how these relationships are affected by country-level investor protection and firm-level governance rankings.

This paper uses accounting disclosure measures constructed based on survey questions by Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia (2001, CLSA). The accounting disclosure measure is used to explain the two dependent variables, stock price synchronicity and stock crash risk. The stock price synchronicity measure is defined as the logistic transformation of R2 following Hutton et al. (2009) and Jin and Myers (2006). R2 is taken from the estimation of an extended market model. The stock crash risk variable is measured as the frequency difference between extremely negative and positive stock return residues following Jin and Myers (2006). These stock return residues are taken from the estimation of an extended market model. Because the CLSA firm-level disclosure data are from 2000, this paper matches other data taken from the same year, for consistency. The final sample includes 204 observations in 13 emerging countries.

This paper finds that firms’ stocks are less synchronized with the entire market and have less crash risk if firms have superior accounting disclosure policies. These results suggest that the cost to collect firm-specific information may be decreased for investors if firms are more transparent. Thus, these firms’ stocks have more firm-specific information content. These results also suggest that management is less likely to hide some negative information and release such negative information suddenly in the future if firms have higher levels of accounting disclosure. Thus, these firms’ stocks are less likely to crash. In addition, the influences of firms’ accounting disclosure policies on stock price synchronicity and crash risk are more significant for firms with superior country-level investor protection and firm-level governance rankings. These results imply that external investors place more value on accounting disclosure by well-governed firms because firms with superior governance standards are less likely to intentionally disclose misleading information. Thus, these firms’ stocks can incorporate more firm-specific information and have less crash risk.

The current study is the first to show that the effects of accounting disclosure on stock price synchronicity and crash risk are more pronounced for firms with superior country-level investor protection and firm-level governance standards. Thus, this research extends the literature by providing a comprehensive picture of the influences of accounting disclosure on stock markets. In addition, the existing literature (Chen et al., 2006; Durnev et al., 2004) shows that firms with lower stock price synchronicity are associated with higher investment efficiency because managers invest based on the information in stock prices. Obviously, higher stock crash risk is highly related to higher bankruptcy risk for firms. Thus, examining the effects of accounting disclosure on stock price synchronicity and stock crash risk is of obvious importance to policy makers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine risk disclosures by UK companies within their annual reports. Tests are performed to measure the level of the readability of the risk disclosures and to assess whether directors are deliberately obscuring bad risk news.

The paper draws upon methodologies developed in prior empirical studies of annual report readability. Thus it uses the Flesch Reading Ease formula to measure the readability of the risk disclosures and coefficients of variation are used to measure obfuscation. A content analysis approach is adopted to identify risk disclosures.

The paper finds that the mean Flesch reading ease ratings for the sample companies are all below 50 indicating that the level of readability of the risk disclosures is difficult or very difficult and this supports prior research examining the readability of sample passages in annual reports. No evidence is found to suggest that directors are deliberately obfuscating or concealing bad risk news through their writing style.

The paper also finds that the Flesch reading ease ratings measure the readability, not the understandability, of disclosures and whilst actions can be taken to minimise problems associated with reliability when performing content analysis they cannot be wholly eliminated.

The paper shows that there have been calls for improved risk disclosures to enable stakeholders to better understand a company's risk position. Requiring directors to issue extra risk information will not, however, lead to enhanced risk communication unless the readability of the risk disclosures is also improved.

In this paper it is shown that there have been no prior studies that focus upon testing for readability and obfuscation in risk disclosures. It is important that transparent risk information is provided to the marketplace and therefore this study is valuable in its examination of the clarity of communication of published risk information.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether the amendments to International Accounting Standard (IAS) 39 and the introduction of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) 9 enhanced the readability, and thus the quality and usefulness of risk disclosure information.

Readability analyses are performed on companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) from 2005 to 2021. The sample period includes the period when companies disclosed information according to IAS 39 (2005–2017) and IFRS 9 (2018–2021).

The results of the analyses show risk disclosures for JSE-listed companies to be complex and difficult to understand. Furthermore, risk disclosures have become longer and less readable with the introduction of amendments to IAS 39 and the introduction of IFRS 9.

This study uses readability measures as a proxy for the complexity and usefulness of risk disclosures. The amount of utility a user of financial statements derives could be dependent on other factors such as the quality of disclosure, individual user background and perceptions.

The results have valuable implications for the various stakeholders that make use of the information contained in financial statements. Stakeholders such as regulators and standard setters should carefully assess how accounting standards change to ensure that one of the key objectives of the IASB, namely, to provide information that is relevant, reliable and understandable, is met.

The results of this study contribute to the discourse on the usefulness of companies’ risk disclosures. Though, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to compare the readability of risk disclosures from an emerging market perspective, the results can be applied to other countries using IFRS to assess the readability of risk disclosures.

This study aims to empirically investigate the effect of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) convergence on corporate risk disclosure, with a particular emphasis on the quantity and coverage of risk information. The research also conducts economic benefit and cost analysis to investigate the economic implications that may arise from the transition to IFRS reporting.

A content analysis approach is used to measure two broader dimensions of risk disclosure, namely, risk disclosure quantity and risk topic coverage. Furthermore, using firm-fixed effect regression on a sample of 143 Indian-listed companies, this study investigates the variations in these risk disclosure dimensions before (2012–2016) and subsequent to (2017–2021) the convergence with IFRS.

The empirical results of this research demonstrate that IFRS convergence has led to a significant improvement in firms’ risk disclosure across several dimensions. Particularly, during the post-IFRS period, firms’ usage of risk-related words and sentences has considerably surged in MD&A, Notes and whole annual reports. In addition, upon IFRS convergence, firms’ risk descriptions have become more extensive and evenly distributed across risk topic categories. Moreover, the in-depth benefit and cost analysis revealed that firms reporting under IFRS benefit from decreased cost of equity capital, but they also incur a higher cost of audit fees.

This study contributes to the literature in two ways. First, this is the only study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to conduct a broader examination of the impact of mandatory IFRS convergence on corporate risk disclosure, with a major focus on quantity and coverage of risk information. Second, by conducting economic benefit and cost analysis, this study provides novel insights into the critical role of IFRS risk disclosures toward multiple economic outcomes.

The aim of this study is to measure the risk disclosure level and to determine the relationship between ownership structure dimensions (institutional ownership, foreign ownership and family ownership) and corporate risk disclosure in Jordan.

This study used a sample of 94 Jordanian listed firms from the Amman Stock Exchange for the period from 2014 to 2017. This study measured risk disclosure using the number of risk-related sentences in the annual report, while random effects regression was used for hypotheses testing.

The results revealed that family ownership has a negative effect on risk disclosure practices, but institutional ownership, foreign ownership, firm size and leverage have no significant effect on the risk disclosure level.

The finding of this study is more likely be useful for many concerned parties, researchers, authorities, investors and financial analysts alike in understanding the current practices of the risk disclosure in Jordan, thus helping them in reconsidering and reviewing the accounting standards and improving the credibility and transparency of the financial reports in the Jordanian capital market.

This study offers novel evidence detailing the impact of ownership structure toward corporate risk disclosure, its implementation in emerging markets following the minimal amount of scholarly efforts on the topic. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first examination of the impact of ownership structure on corporate risk disclosure. Thus, this study has important implications for the decisions of executives, policymakers, shareholders and lenders, as it enables them to better understand the linkage between ownership structure on corporate risk disclosure.

The purpose of this study is to examine the association between two reporting mechanisms used by managers to communicate risk information to the capital market: risk disclosure and earnings smoothing.

This study juxtaposes two competing hypotheses, the “opportunistic” and the “signaling”, and empirically investigates whether one dominates the other for a sample of large UK firms for the period 2005–2015. This study also uses the global financial crisis as an arguably exogenous shock on overall risk in the economy to investigate its effect on managers' joint use of textual risk disclosures and earnings smoothing.

This study finds that risk disclosure and earnings smoothing are negatively associated. This finding supports that managers with incentives to mask the firm’s true underlying risk through smoothing earnings provide lower levels of risk-related disclosures. This study documents that the trade-off between risk disclosure and earnings smoothing is more pronounced during the global financial crisis period than before and after the crisis period. Further, this study demonstrates a more negative association for firms with higher volatility of cash flows. This negative association is robust to various model specifications, additional corporate governance related controls and an alternative measure of earnings smoothing.

The findings provide new empirical evidence about the association between risk disclosure and earnings smoothing and support the opportunistic hypothesis, especially when firms are faced with increased risk.

In the presence of “real effects” of disclosure in a production economy, this research aims to investigate the link between disclosure and cost of capital relating to different time periods: namely the post-disclosure cost of capital (the cost of capital subsequent to disclosure), the pre-disclosure cost of capital (the cost of capital for the period leading up to disclosure) and the overall cost of capital (the cost of capital across both periods). The author also extends the analysis to whether and how in the presence of a real effect of disclosure, investors' ex ante welfare might be affected.

This research is conducted via stylized models.

The author demonstrates that, first, in contrast to findings in a pure-exchange economy, in a production-based economy where disclosure affects firms' investment decisions, both the overall cost of capital and the investors' ex ante welfare can be affected by disclosure quality. As disclosure quality improves, the post-disclosure cost of capital may either increase or decrease, as may the pre-disclosure cost of capital. The change in the post-disclosure cost of capital is not fully offset by the change in the pre-disclosure cost of capital, and therefore the overall cost of capital can either increase or decrease. Second, a firm's profitability of existing and new production are critical factors in determining whether cost of capital increases or decreases with disclosure quality. The author characterizes conditions under which higher disclosure quality increases or decreases the disclosing firm's cost of capital over different time periods. Third, when disclosure affects interrelated firms' production decisions, the disclosing firm's overall cost of capital changes with disclosure quality, even when the marginal (unconditional) distribution of the disclosing firm's cash flow is not affected by the disclosure.

This research contributes to a largely unexplored but important area: the real effect of disclosure on the cost of capital.

This paper aims to investigate the determinants of operational and liquidity risk reporting for the Tunisian insurance and banking sectors after the outbreak of the Tunisian revolution on 14 January 2011.

A manual content analysis approach was used to measure risk disclosure by counting the number of risk-related words within risk-related sentences in a wide range of publications.

The results show that operational risk disclosure is associated positively with operational losses frequency, institution size and the proportion of independent non-executive members of the board of directors. Also, board size is found to be negatively associated with risk disclosure. Moreover, net stable funding ratio, size and proportion of independent non-executive members have a positive effect on liquidity risk disclosure. The authors also discover that infrequency of board meetings and the presence of young members on the board increase the extent of liquidity risk information.

The research focuses on a small number of observations which somewhat restrict the generalization of results to the entire class of financial sector in Tunisia. Also, the qualitative character of some supposed explanatory variables (frequency and severity of operational risk) relies heavily on the experiences of interviewees and their basic perceptions.

Investors might do well to rely on such characteristics (large board size, less active board and a high proportion of non-executive directors) to predict the disclosure of risk information, either operational or liquidity risk. Board members should keep an eye on reporting on risk, by promoting the success keys of governance, because good corporate governance has to be recognizable at first to be an effective value driver.

The findings rationalize the debate over the impact of improved corporate governance on risk disclosure practices within the context of the Tunisian revolution. The logic of this rationalization may help to promote political incentives that will encourage a risk management culture based on a dynamic communication framework.

Communication of risk management (RM) practices are a critical component of good corporate governance. Research, to date, has been of little benefit in informing regulators internationally. This paper seeks to contribute to the literature by investigating how listed Australian companies disclose RM information in annual report governance statements in accordance with the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) corporate governance framework.

To address this study’s research questions and related hypotheses, the authors examine the top 300 ASX-listed companies by market capitalisation at 30 June 2010. For these firms, the authors identify, code and categorise RM disclosures made in the annual according to the disclosure categories specified in ASX Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations (CGPR). The derived data are then examined using a comprehensive approach comprising thematic content analysis and regression analysis.

The results indicate widespread divergence in disclosure practices and low conformance with the Principle 7 of the ASX CGPR. This result suggests that companies are not disclosing all “material business risks” possibly due to ignorance at the board level, or due to the intentional withholding of sensitive information from financial statement users. The findings also show mixed results across the factors expected to influence disclosure behaviour. While the presence of a risk committee (RC) (in particular, a standalone RC) and technology committee (TC) are found to be associated with some improvement in disclosure levels, the authors do not find evidence that company risk measures (as proxied by equity beta and the market-to-book ratio) are significantly associated with greater levels of RM disclosure. Also, contrary to common findings in the disclosure literature, factors such as board independence and expertise, audit committee independence and the usage of a Big-4 auditor do not seem to impact the level of RM disclosure in the Australian context.

The study is limited by the sample and study period selection as the RM disclosures of only the largest (top 300) ASX firms are examined for the fiscal year 2010. Thus, the findings may not be generalisable to smaller firms or earlier/later years. Also, the findings may have limited applicability in other jurisdictions with different regulatory environments.

The study’s findings suggest that insufficient attention has been applied to RM disclosures by listed companies in Australia. These results suggest RM disclosures practices observed in the Australian setting may not be meeting the objectives of regulators and the needs of stakeholders.

The Australian setting provides an ideal environment to examine RM communication as the ASX has explicitly recommended RM disclosures areas in its principle-based governance rules since 2007 (Principle 7). This differs from other jurisdictions where such disclosure recommendations are typically not provided and provides us with a benchmark to examine the nature and quality of RM disclosures. Despite the recommendation, the authors reveal that low levels and poor RM communication are prevalent in the Australian setting and warrant further investigation.