This study examines the impact of board composition on the level of voluntary disclosure in the annual reports of listed Jordanian firms. Content analysis is used to collect the required data form the 2012-annual reports of 103 firms listed on the Amman Stock Exchange. Overall, the empirical evidence provided by the study is in line with the agency theory predictions. Furthermore, they have practical implications for firms and regulators in Jordan on the importance of the board of directors and voluntary disclosure as control mechanisms for mitigating the effect of the information asymmetries and agency problems. The study shows a moderate level of voluntary disclosure in the annual reports of Jordanian firms. However, insurance firms tend to disclose more voluntary information than industrial and services firms. Also, the results suggest that Jordanian firms with a high-level of board ownership concentration tend to keep the level of voluntary disclosure low. On the other hand, the presence of foreign directors on the board seems to influence, positively, the level of voluntary disclosure in Jordanian firms. Likewise, the proportion of the old directors on the boards in Jordanian firms is very high and is significantly associated with a higher level of voluntary disclosure.

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This paper aims to identify the determinants of credit risk in Jordanian banks. The sample consist of all banks listed on Amman Stock Exchange (ASE); which include 13 conventional banks and 2 Islamic banks, with the data covering the period from 2012 - 2019. Credit risk is represented by the percentage of non-performing loans over total loans given by the bank. Both bank-specific variables and macroeconomic variables that are likely to influence credit risk are examined. Based on the multiple regression analysis, the results indicate that the level of credit risk faced by Jordanian banks is negatively related to each of the banks’ profitability, interest income earned by the bank, the size of the bank, and the type of the bank. The results also show that there is a significant positive relationship between the banks’ loans quality and the unemployment rate in Jordan with the level of credit risk. The results, however, indicate that there is no a significant relationship between liquidity, inflation, and gross domestic products with credit risk faced by Jordanian banks.   Received: 27 June 2022 / Accepted: 28 August 2022 / Published: 2 September 2022

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This paper examines the effect of accounting conservatism on several financial decisions in Jordan. In particular, it aims to expose the effect of accounting conservatism on cash holdings, dividends distributions, and leverage for a sample of 83 Jordanian industrial and service firms listed on the Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) for the period 2015-2019. The feasible generalised least squares (FGLS) regression technique is used to test the association between accounting conservatism and financial decisions. The findings of this paper reveal a negative and significant relationship between accounting conservatism and cash holding. However, positive but insignificant relationships are reported between accounting conservatism and both dividends distributions and leverage. These findings have important implications for investors, corporate managers, and policymakers. The study recommends that future research use different measures of leverage, such as debt-to-equity ratio and long-term debt to equity ratio, in order to compare the results of different measuring instruments. It also recommends incorporating other measures of conservatism, such as market to book ratio and timeliness asymmetric measure.   Received: 23 March 2022 / Accepted: 20 June 2022 / Published: 5 July 2022