Gehan A. Mousa

The study assesses corporate forward-looking disclosure by measuring four attributes, namely disclosure quantity, disclosure coverage, disclosure concentration and disclosure quality, through a sample of 34 listed firms in the Bahrain Bourse from 2014 to 2017. The study also investigates the relationship between these attributes and stock return volatility. Regression analysis has been employed with five different models to examine the relationship between the four attributes of corporate forward-looking disclosure and stock return volatility. The main finding of this study agrees with the results of Bravo et al. (2009) who found that the selection of a specific disclosure index could influence crucially the results of the analysis. In addition, stock return volatility has a statistically significant negative association with the three attributes of forward-looking disclosure, namely disclosure quantity, disclosure coverage and disclosure quality. In contrast, it has a non-significant association with the fourth attribute of forward-looking disclosure, disclosure concentration. This study provides a novel contribution to disclosure quality studies by being the first study to examine forward-looking disclosure quality attributes in the Kingdom of Bahrain.

This empirical study aims mainly to investigate the effect of both dividend payments (DP) and five firm's attributes (firm size, firm leverage, firm performance, legal form and audit quality) on earnings quality (EQ) of the most active listed firms in Egypt. A sample of 552 firm-year observations during four years from 2014 to 2017 was used. Hierarchical Multiple Regression (HMR) was used to regress the six independent variables on firms’ EQ through the absence of firms’ earnings management (EM), which was estimated through discretionary accruals (DAC). Main results show that there is some divergence in EM practices over the four years and might suggest that EM by listed firms in Egypt exists especially in the first two years (2014 and 2015); how¬ever, relatively lower EM practices are found in the last two years (2016 and 2017). Correlation results show a number of significant relationships between the EM and three independent variables (firm leverage, legal form and audit quality). HMR results are in line with the results obtained via Pearson correlation.

This study is of an exploratory nature as it seeks to explore the extent to which the language of emotions in the banks’ annual reports is affected by the global financial crisis (GFC). The language of emotions was analyzed using eight categories (trust, anticipation, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise and joy) in annual reports of 12 listed banks from six countries in the Middle East area (namely, Jordan, Kingdom of Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Sultanate of Oman, Kuwait, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) from 2002 to 2017. The final data set consists of 192 bank-year observations. The study time was divided into three periods (pre, during and post GFC). In addition, the study enriches accounting literature by being the first study to test Pollyanna hypothesis using emotion analysis. The results of the study show that the percentage of emotional words in banks’ annual reports (2002–2017) represents almost 22% on average. The trust, anticipation and fear categories were the most affected than other emotional categories during GFC. While the trust category decreased, both the fear and anticipation categories increased. Other findings of the study show that regardless of GFC, emotional words of trust and anticipation categories in banks’ annual reports have dominated the emotional words of the disgust and surprise categories. Therefore, Pollyanna hypothesis is supported. In contrast to the emotional words of the joy category in banks’ annual reports which has not dominated the sadness category. In this case, Pollyanna hypothesis is rejected.