Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between corporate performance and social and environmental disclosure for two African leading countries namely, South Africa (common law country) and Morocco (civil law country). Design/methodology/approach – The sample consists of 168 annual reports spanning from 2004 to 2009. A content analysis of companies’ annual reports is used to measure the extent of voluntary social and environmental disclosure. Findings – Results show that social and environmental disclosure has a significant positive effect on corporate performance only in the South African setting. Originality/value – The findings emphasize the need to explicitly consider the legal and institutional setting prevailing in each context. For instance, social and environmental organizations in South Africa enjoy more power to influence companies’ social and environmental reporting policy, whereas, their counterparts in Morocco, enjoy less power to place pressure on companies to incorporate social and environmental considerations into business operations.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to investigate the association between disclosure and seven corporate characteristics which are ownership dispersion, analysts following, audit firm size, leverage, corporate size, profitability, and multi-nationality. Design/methodology/approach -The paper applies the meta-analysis technique developed by Hunter et al. in 1982 to a sample of 16 articles published between 1997 and 2006 for the purpose of cumulating and integrating the findings across studies. Findings -The paper shows a significant association between disclosure and audit firm size. Originality/value -The paper is an extension of previous work of Ahmed and Courtis to the extent that it includes other determinants of disclosure not included in prior works. It also aims at reconciling the inconsistent results of prior studies.

In this article, we meta-analyse 69 empirical studies assessing the association between corporate voluntary disclosure and ownership concentration and types, and how institutional characteristics and research design moderate these relationships. Our overall analyses show that state, foreign and institutional ownerships have a positive effect but managerial ownership and ownership concentration have a negative effect on voluntary disclosure. Since the overall effect may conceal the underlying factors that cause heterogeneity in the effect size distribution, we select two important institutional factors: country-level investor protection and the equity market development, and research design and journal quality, to explain the mixed and conflicting findings. Our results emphasise the need to consider legal and institutional characteristics, and researcher induced-artefacts, in understanding the role of ownership structure and identity in corporate voluntary disclosure. JEL Classification: M41

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to meta‐analyze the results of 22 empirical studies that examine the relationship between voluntary disclosure and cost of equity capital. The authors examine whether differences in results are attributable to moderating effects related to disclosure environment, the measurement of the disclosure score and the proxy used to measure the cost of equity capital.Design/methodology/approachThe approach used is the meta‐analysis statistic technique developed by Hunter et al.FindingsThe results emphasize the need to explicitly consider the legal and institutional aspects (high disclosure environment versus low disclosure environment) when one analyzes the association between disclosure level and cost of equity capital.Originality/valueSince the authors' analysis confirms the negative association between disclosure and cost of equity capital in countries characterized by low disclosure environment, managers in these contexts are encouraged to make more voluntary disclosure in order to reduce uncertainty among investors and increase the marketability of their securities.

Balanced Scorecardfe a t u r e a r t i c l e 57