Corporate disclosure and foreign share ownership: empirical evidence from African countries

Purpose – The study aims to seeks to ascertain the impact of corporate disclosure on foreign equity ownership. Corporate disclosures are important to for stock markets because it is an activity that mitigates information differences between company insiders and outsiders. Design/methodology/approach – Corporate disclosures assume an even greater important when company outsiders are not domiciled in the same country as the company and the company insiders. In this study, the relation between foreign share ownership and corporate disclosures using data on Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria is examined. Findings – The consistent results in this study are that foreign share ownership is positively related to firm size. A negative relation, however, between foreign share ownership and corporate disclosure is found, but this turns out to be related to disclosures about ownership, while disclosures on financial reporting and board management have a positive and insignificant statistical relation taking into account unobserved country, time and firm effects. Further analysis shows that corporate disclosures are very persistent and negatively related to lag foreign share ownership. No consistent statistical relation is found between disclosure and market-to-book values as a proxy for investment opportunities. It is recommended to African-listed firms to pursue adoption of high-quality financial reporting standards and to increase their reporting on board management. The study also recommends that the African Government weighs the benefits of detailed ownership disclosures. Originality/value – The study utilises frontier market data to complement existing literature on how corporate disclosure and transparency influences foreign investors decision to invest in Africa.