Integrated Modeling of Causes and Consequences of Forward-Looking Information Disclosure in Annual Reports

The forward-looking information disclosure presents the information that enables the beneficiaries to evaluate a company's future that might involve financial forecasts and uncertainty. This affects the company's performance and decreases the stock return volatility. The present research aims at integrated modeling of the causes and consequences of forward-looking information disclosure. This study is an applied descriptive correlational research. The sample included 93 companies listed on the Tehran stock exchange from 2013 to 2019. The impact of all the causes of forward-looking information disclosure and its consequences was extracted by applying the structural equation modeling method. The consequences include capital cost and informational asymmetry, and the causes of forward-looking information disclosure include macroeconomic features, financial performance, ownership structure, board characteristics, structural properties, and audit. In short, according to the obtained results, the forward-looking information disclosure significantly positively affects the capital cost. On the contrary, it has no significant influence on informational asymmetry. Further, the results of testing the model revealed that the variables of ownership structure and financial performance positively influence forward-looking information disclosure. In addition, the impact of macroeconomic characteristics is negative, and there is no relationship between the forward-looking information disclosure with the audit, structural features, and the board's characteristics.