Voluntary Disclosure and Corporate Governance

This book aimed to identify the level of voluntary disclosure and the corporate governance attributes that would affect the level of voluntary disclosure in the annual financial reports of Jordanian banks listed in the Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) for the years 2007-2010. The corporate governance attributes include (i) the board of directors’ size, (ii) the independence of the board, (iii) the separation between the position of chairman of the board of directors and CEO, (iv) the audit firm, (v) the profitability of the company and (vi) the concentration of the company's capital. Other attributes examined include: the size of the firm, the company's financial leverage and the number of branches. To measure voluntary disclosure, a disclosure index including 80 items was applied to the annual reports of (15) Jordanian banks listed in the ASE. A multiple regression model was employed and the results showed that, on average a bank disclosed 59.52% of the items included in the voluntary disclosure index. In addition, the results indicated that there was no relationship between voluntary disclosure and corporate governance which was measured by the above six mentioned variables.