5. Conclusion
We offer evidence on the bidirectional association between TD and FP We add to the scarce evidence on TD in developing countries. We extend prior research, which mainly focus on one direction, to measuring the bidirection between FP and disclosure.
We provide evidence that Egyptian firms tend to benefit from greater good news disclosure. Our results may help regulators to adopt an appropriate balance of legislation, regulatory reform and enforcement to make improvements in the good and bad disclosure practices as well as the enhancement of organisational legitimacy. While previous research showed that analysts and investors rely on annual report narratives for decision-making, these statements remain largely unregulated and unaudited. The study will be of value to academic researchers in the field of impression management and to users of annual reports who may rely on narrative sections, such as the chairman’s statement, for decision-making.
We focus only on annual reports. Future research may consider other financial communication channels. We focus only on Egyptian firms. However, we believe that the same hypotheses are worth testing outside Egypt, and that it is reasonable to expect a higher level of tone management disclosure in other countries with better investor protection and with more developed capital markets. While this study used ROA as an accounting measure for performance, further research may use Tobin’s Q or other market-based measure of performance. Future research may also examine the impact of the Arab Spring on the association between TD and FP. Finally, it might be interesting to test the association between TD and FP before and after political crises such as the Arab Spring.
