This study aims to examine the impact of board characteristics (BCs) on banks’ annual reports readability (BARR). Further, it examines whether bank size (BS) moderates the association between BC and BARR. The study employs a sample of 208 bank-year observations from both listed and non-listed banks in the Egyptian stock exchange (EGX), utilizing data spanning from 2016 to 2023. The study employs a random-effect regression model to test the hypotheses and discuss the results. The results suggest that BARR has a significant association with board meetings, gender and cultural diversity. Furthermore, BS played a moderating role in determining the association between BCs and BARR, supporting the second hypothesis. The findings show that the BCs and disclosure quality differ for banks of varying sizes. The findings have practical implications for the Egyptian banking sector, highlighting that board structure is critical to transparency and maintaining public trust. Additionally, the results focus policymakers’ attention on standardizing the contents and structure of banks’ annual reports, with the aim of reducing managers’ manipulation of disclosures and reducing the level of information asymmetry between stockholders, as suggested by the agency theory.

This study investigates the influences of financial performance and economic determinants (inflation rate and economic growth) on financial distress (FD) in the MENA region in the context of the contagion effect theory and Minsky’s financial instability theory. This paper examines the determinants of financial distress in the MENA region from 2002 until 2020 using pooled OLS, fixed effect, and GMM panel estimation models; then the results are used to estimate the effect over the long run. The results show that the things that cause financial distress are changing a lot between countries in the MENA region. This shows how important it is to separate the effects of economic and financial factors. The results show the significance of economic growth, ROA, ROE, inflation, and stock market profitability using fixed effects. The results changed when we used GMM, concluding that economic growth, ROA, ROE, and stock market profitability were significant, while inflation was not significant. Therefore, there is a significant and negative relationship between financial distress and economic growth in GCC-MENA as well as other MENA countries. Our results can be of importance to investors and regulators. The introduction of a more stable political environment and engagement in international economic and financial markets will decrease the negative impacts of financial distress and boost economic growth and its sustainability in the MENA region.

The current study aims to identify the factors influencing the disclosure of climate-related risk information by the MENA banking sector and how bank financial stability acts as a moderator. The study draws from agency theory, resource dependency theory, and organizational legitimacy theory. Textual analysis is used to analyze a panel data set comprising 46 banks of 13 MENA countries for the years 2020 to 2024 (230 observations). We investigate the impact of board independence, board size, and gender diversity on climate risk disclosure. It is found that while board size and gender diversity have a positive effect on CRD, there is no direct effect of board independence on CRD. However, after taking bank financial stability (Z-score) into account as a moderating variable, it is revealed that there is a significantly positive relationship between board independence and bank financial stability. Therefore, it can be said that independent board members are helpful in CRD only when banks have sound financial stability. This study provides various robustness tests through subsample analysis and alternative methods of estimating model parameters.