Title: Corporate governance, transparency and performance: empirical evidence from UAE

Authors: Mostafa Kamal Hassan; Cristina Florio; Bassam Abu Abbas

Addresses: Department of Accounting and Information Systems, College of Business and Economics, Qatar University, P.O. Box 2713, Doha, Qatar ' Department of Business Administration, University of Verona, Via Cantarane, 24, 37129 Verona, Italy ' Department of Accounting and Information Systems, College of Business and Economics, Qatar University, P.O. Box 2713, Doha, Qatar

Abstract: The paper uses both the agency theory and the legitimacy theory to provide a complementary framework that links different patterns of disclosures (i.e., transparency) to corporate performance for a sample of 116 United Arab Emirates (UAE) listed firms between years 2008-2016. It investigates the relationship between corporate disclosures (i.e., transparency), organisational commitment to law, a set of governance mechanisms (namely, board size, CEO decision-making power, and foreign ownership) and corporate performance while controlling for corporate specific characteristics such as size, type, age and leverage. The empirical results show that transparency indices have a puzzling pattern across different performance measures - namely return on assets, asset turnover and organisational growth. The paper is one of very few studies that examine the association between corporate transparency and corporate performance in an emerging market economy such as the UAE.

Keywords: transparency; governance; performance; disclosure indexes; emerging economies; UAE.

DOI: 10.1504/AAJFA.2022.124252

Afro-Asian Journal of Finance and Accounting, 2022 Vol.12 No.3, pp.312 - 344

Received: 25 Jul 2018
Accepted: 23 Mar 2019
Published online: 20 Jul 2022 *

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