Impact of executives' profile on the extent of voluntary financial disclosure : the case of Tunisian companies

The main purpose of this paper is to examine how important the profile of manager is to voluntary financial disclosure in the Tunisian emerging market. We mobilize the upper echelon theory which suggests that human factors may affect firm strategy and performance. We investigate the characteristics of voluntary financial disclosure in Tunisia which has incurred important changes during recent years. Tunisia is an African developing country of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) that tends to improve the quality of governance and more specifically of the voluntary disclosure to attract foreign investors. However, the voluntary disclosure of information is not yet strictly regulated and many firms are still unwilling to disclosure voluntary information in their annual reports. The needs of the external users of annuals reports are constantly growing as well. In addition, after the globalization of financial market, Tunisian legislator encourage listed companies to be more transparent to satisfy the need of different users and to attract international investors. This exploratory study proposes the existence of a relationship between manager profile and the extent of voluntary financial disclosure. We expect that the profile of managers matters for firms’ disclosure decision. After applying a linear regression using information from the annual reports of 32 Tunisian companies during the years 2008-2009, results show that the age of manager has a particularly significant effect on the extent of voluntary financial disclosure.