Earning Voluntary Disclosures and Corporate Governance: Evidence from France

Abstract

The primary objective of this paper is to study the relationship between earning voluntary disclosures made by French firms managers and a set of corporate governance combined attributes. Corporate governance attributes examined in this study include ownership structure, institutional investors ownership, board characteristics, the existence of a unitary leadership structure and the influence of executive stock option plans. We use binary logit models to check our hypotheses. The results indicate significant negative associations between earning voluntary disclosures and ownership concentration, and between earning voluntary disclosures and an unitary leadership structure. The current results also show that firms providing earning voluntary disclosures are more inclined to have increasing institutional ownership, and to offer stock option plans for their executives. These results imply that corporate governance structure of French listed firms has to support new requirements in order to improve market transparency.