Disclosure Quality and Ownership Structure:Evidence from the SBF 120

Recent research asserts that financial reporting and disclosure are an important feature of good corporate governance and the way management communicate firm performance and governance to outside investor. This paper examines empirically the effect of public ownership on firm's disclosure and the relation between disclosure quality and firm performance. Agency theory predicts that investors' information demand increases with agency costs of the firm. Public ownership increases agency costs and therefore should improve investors' information need and enhance disclosure. This study test whether firms with higher public holding provide a better quality disclosure by examining the analysts coverage as a proxy for the firm disclosure quality.Moreover, according to recent studies associating management turnover to poor performance, managers have incentives to enhance disclosure in a context of bad performance to keep their job.Our tests indicate that after controlling for size and debt, firms with higher levels of public ownership are more likely to engage in better quality disclosure than others but there is no evidence about a relation between disclosure quality and firm performance