Corporate Governance and Risk Reporting: Evidence from Operational Risk Disclosures in European Banks

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the impact of corporate governance mechanisms on the quality of operational risk disclosures provided in the annual reports and risk reports in a representative sample of 63 publicly listed European banks for the fiscal years 2008 and 2009. We find that banks having a higher proportion of outside board directors are associated with higher operational risk disclosure quality. Additionally, our results make it clear that the agency theory outweighs the management entrenchment theory in banks as implied by a consistent positive association between the proportion of outstanding shares held by executive directors and operational risk disclosure quality. Interestingly, we find that more stringent legal system could enforce, or motivate, senior management to provide their bank’s stakeholders with operational risk information of higher quality. Our results coincide with the findings of previous studies and confirm the positive impact of effective corporate governance mechanisms on disclosure quality in public firms and the importance of considering the effects of the legal setting in which various disclosure practices take place.