This paper examines the relationship between corporate environmental disclosure (CED) and earnings management (EM) of 245 UK non-financial companies for the period between 1 April 2006 and 31 March 2007. Three different theoretical frameworks are used to identify the expected association between CER and EM. These include: signalling theory, agency theory and stakeholder-legitimacy theory. We find no significant statistical association between various measures of discretionary accruals and environmental disclosure. This result suggests that UK corporate managers are not using environmental disclosure as a technique to reduce the probability that public policy actions will be taken against their companies (Patten and Trompeter, 2003). We also find that some corporate governance attributes affect the relationship between CER and EM.

This improvement may be due to the application of Saudi CG code in 2007. The analysis also shows that government and family ownership, firm size, and firm age are positive determinants of CSR disclosure, firm leverage is a negative determinant, while effective AC, board independence, role duality, institutional ownership, firm profitability, and industry type are found not to be determinants of CSR disclosure. Originality/value: This study is important because it uses agency theory to ascertain the influence of specific board characteristics and ownership structures on disclosure. As a result it provides important implications for CG regulators and different stakeholders and provides an evaluation of the recently applied Saudi CG code from CSR disclosure perspective.

Our study has three objectives. The first is to determine the level of voluntary disclosure in Saudi Arabia. The second is to compare this level with that of some other Arab countries. The third is to identify the main drivers of voluntary disclosure in Saudi Arabia. We use a disclosure checklist of 54 items to measure levels of voluntary disclosure. We also use the ordinary least square (OLS) regression analysis to test our hypotheses for a sample of 361 firm-year observations of firms listed on the Saudi Stock Exchange over the period 2007-2011. We find that the average voluntary disclosure level is 18.38%. This rate is the lowest rate among the other Arab countries studied; the rates ranged from 26.08% in Tunisia to 75.76% in Bahrain. This lowest rate of voluntary disclosure is not commensurate with the size of the Saudi economy which contributes 25% of the total Arab countries' GDP, and is the world's 25 th largest exporter/importer. Our analysis also shows that firm size, firm age, firm profitability, auditor specialization, family ownership, and industry type positively affect voluntary disclosure. We find, however, a negative relation between firm leverage and voluntary disclosure. Our analysis also shows that board independence, Big 4 and state ownership have no impact on voluntary disclosure. Our findings should be of interest to the regulating bodies, accounting standards' setters, auditors and managers. These findings should help in recognizing the main drivers of voluntary disclosure and in setting appropriate policies in relation to voluntary disclosure, and hence, encourage firms to disseminate more information voluntarily.

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