The impact of ownership structure and family board domination on voluntary disclosure for Jordanian listed companies

Abstract

his study investigates the impact of ownership structure and family board domination on voluntary disclosure for Jordanian listed companies. Owner- ship structure is characterised by government ownership, outside ownership, man- agerial ownership and number of shareholders. This study is based on a cross- sectional examination of the effect of corporate ownership structure and family domination on voluntary disclosure after controlling other variables for 57 non- financial Jordanian companies listed on the Amman Stock Exchange. The multiple regression results show that the extent of voluntary disclosure is positively asso- ciated with government ownership and negatively associated with the proportion of shares held by management. Furthermore, we show that family domination is a significant factor in explaining variations in voluntary disclosure. We conclude that government ownership can help to promote transparency, but it has not yet eliminated the influence of management and the family control of boards on disclosure. However, outside ownership and number of shareholders are not asso- ciated with voluntary disclosure.