ارتباط ارزش افشا: شواهدی از بازار سرمایه نوظهور مصر

This study examines the value of voluntary and mandatory disclosure in a market that applies International Accounting Standards (IAS) with limited penalties for non compliance. The lack of enforcement creates an element of choice in the level of mandatory disclosure by companies. Using panel-data analysis, our empirical results show that, after controlling for factors such as asset size and profitability, mandatory disclosure has a highly significant but negative relationship with firm value. This result, although puzzling from a traditional perspective, is consistent with the predictions of analytical accounting models, which emphasize the complex interplay of factors determining disclosure effects. Our results also show that voluntary disclosure has a positive but insignificant association with firm value. This lack of statistical significance supports the view that there is a complex interplay of different factors determining the relationship between disclosure and firm value.

Prior studies about the economic consequences of disclosure generally focus on voluntary disclosure and are mostly conducted in developed markets such as the United States, where strong enforcement mechanisms exist. In this context, companies tend to comply fully with mandatory-disclosure requirements and reveal additional information to the public on a voluntary basis. Empirical results on disclosure are generally consistent with finance-theory predictions that more public information enhances firm value by reducing the firm's cost of capital, or increasing the cash flows that accrue to shareholders, or both. In addition, they suggest that the type of disclosure is crucial to any analysis as the market responds differently to different types of disclosure (Botosan & Plumlee, 2002). Prior studies, however, focus either on investigating the link between voluntary disclosure levels and stock liquidity (see for example: Healy et al., 1999 and Leuz and Verrecchia, 2000), or on testing the link between voluntary-disclosure levels and a proxy for the cost of equity capital (see for example: Botosan and Plumlee, 2002 and Hail, 2002). There is little direct empirical evidence with regard to the relationship between voluntary disclosure and firm value in general and for emerging markets in particular. Perhaps surprisingly, the literature on the economic consequences of mandatory disclosure is limited and somewhat ambivalent in its conclusions (Bushee and Leuz, 2005 and Healy and Palepu, 2001). The effects of mandatory-disclosure requirements are potentially complex, since companies can respond to the imposed costs in various ways. As Bushee and Leuz (2005: 2–8) emphasize, if disclosure regulation means both mandatory-reporting obligations and the enforcement of these obligations, then companies can choose to comply with the mandatory regulations, trade in a different market, go private, or not seek a stock market listing. The impact of mandatory disclosure can be divided into direct and indirect effects. Direct effects arise from the cost of compliance with mandatory disclosure. Such costs may be sizeable if firms' information systems need to be changed to gather additional data, if audit fees rise, or if the publication costs of annual reports increase.1 There are also indirect effects associated with mandatory disclosures arising from externalities. These externalities can be positive or negative and the question about whether the net externality is positive or negative is fundamentally an empirical matter (Bushee & Leuz, 2005: 237). A typical, positive externality in a perfectly competitive market could arise from increased liquidity and reduced costs of information, where a number of (compliant) companies could be used by investors as guides to assess the performance and risk of other firms. However, if markets are imperfectly competitive then increased disclosure can attract investors away from other firms, resulting in lower price efficiency. For example, if traders face additional costs in studying a firm's disclosures as well as the extra costs of learning about a firm's industry, then traders may face lower costs when studying firms in the same industry. In such a case, both positive and negative externalities may be present. When one firm spends more on disclosure, other firms in the same industry may gain new investors, while firms in other industries may lose out (Fishman & Hagerty, 1989: 643). Analytical accounting models also challenge the traditional view of disclosure effects. Wagenhofer (2004) argues that the effects of disclosure depend on three factors; uncertainty, multiperson settings with conflicts of interest, and information asymmetry. Depending on the assumptions made about these factors, it is possible to predict a negative relationship between increased disclosure and firm value. For example, more public disclosure might reduce private information acquisition by market participants and hence reduce the total amount of information available in the capital market. More public information might also have negative net benefits if the information places a firm at a competitive disadvantage relative to its rivals. Furthermore, information might have a negative value, even if its production is costless to the company, because investors may perceive themselves to be worse off if they consider that the company is disclosing information which might be exploited to their detriment. Investors might suspect or misinterpret the intentions of the company in providing more information to the market without an obligation to do so. For example, even if noncompliance costs with disclosure requirements are negligible, the company might comply with mandatory disclosures simply to prepare for a new share issue in the near future. In this context, investors might perceive the firm to be acting on “superior” information, and change their valuations relative to a situation in which the firm is not perceived to act on such information. In summary, the impact of disclosure on firm value is still an empirical issue. This study investigates the value of voluntary and mandatory disclosure in a market that applies IAS but where penalties for non compliant companies are limited or nonexistent. It takes a step towards filling a number of gaps identified in the current literature. First, most prior studies focus on companies listed in developed capital markets, mainly the United States. This study extends the literature by investigating the economic consequences of disclosure in an emerging capital market (Egypt). Second, many prior studies suggest that increased disclosure will reduce the firm's cost of capital and hence increase its value. However, there is a lack of direct empirical evidence with respect to the relationship between disclosure level and firm value. This study examines empirically the link between the extent of financial disclosure and firm value. Third, most prior studies focus on voluntary disclosure, since mandatory-disclosure levels tend not to differ between companies in developed markets.2 This study tests the impact of both mandatory and voluntary disclosure, because listed companies tend not to comply fully with mandatory-disclosure requirements in the Egyptian context. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 supplies an overview of Egypt's stock exchange and financial-reporting regulations. Section 3 provides a discussion of the current literature and the research hypotheses. Data collection and information sources, as well as the empirical proxies of disclosure levels and firm value are presented in Section 4. Section 5 provides a discussion of the results from a univariate analysis and from a multivariate regression model proposed by this research. Finally, the research conclusions and suggestions for future work are presented in Section 6.

This research uses panel-data analysis to examine empirically the association between mandatory as well as voluntary disclosures and firm value for Egyptian listed companies. After controlling for asset size, profitability, leverage, sales growth, and industry type, the estimation results show a highly significant negative association between mandatory disclosure and firm value. Although this appears to be a puzzling result from the traditional perspective of the relationship between firm value and disclosure, we provide a number of theoretical arguments and a range of empirical evidence as to why such an association might arise. The main explanation is that costs associated with mandatory disclosure outweighed the benefits of such disclosure even when penalties for noncompliance were negligible in the Egyptian setting. One policy recommendation is that stiffer penalties should accompany mandatory disclosure requirements. Such penalties might encourage greater compliance with mandatory disclosure requirements and avoid these disclosures being seen as an adverse signal by outside investors. The regression results show a (weaker) positive relationship between voluntary disclosure and firm value. This result conforms to the traditional view that more information adds value to companies. Although the relationship is not statistically significant on an individual basis, it is jointly significant with mandatory disclosure. This study is one of the first investigations to examine the value of voluntary and mandatory disclosure in an emerging capital market; however it has a number of limitations. One potential limitation of studies using disclosure indices to investigate disclosure levels is that the results are only valid to the extent that the disclosure index used is appropriate. The selection of the items included in the disclosure index, and the classification into mandatory and voluntary disclosure indices, inevitably involves some degree of judgment and subjectivity. Although we have tried to diminish such subjectivity it cannot be removed entirely. Also, due to missing data we were unable to test for fixed effects in our panel-data analysis. Another limitation is that the research sample is not randomly selected. This is due to the difficulty of gathering data in an emerging country; hence, availability of data limits our ability to select a random sample. Further research could take a number of directions. One fruitful extension might be to re-examine the value of both mandatory and voluntary disclosure after the introduction of the new listing rules, which took place in August 2002. Specifically, it would be useful to know whether the new listing rules have led to any improvements in the level of compliance with mandatory disclosure and whether this in turn led to increases, if any, in the value relevance of such disclosures. Another extension of this study would be to examine the implications of applying new accounting standards to the cost of capital and firm value. For example, to test whether the implementation of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) for UK listed companies lead to any reductions in their cost of capital. Other proxies for disclosure quality could also be used, such as interim reports, investor relations, and management forecasts. Finally, it might be instructive to conduct a comparative study among a number of different countries in the MENA region, which apply IFRS but with different levels of enforcement policies, in order to determine the generality of our results from the Egyptian context.