This paper examines how a country’s regulatory environment interacts
with firms’ institutional corporate governance arrangements to
affect the disclosure that these firms provide in their annual reports.
Prior literature indicates that firms with stronger corporate governance
arrangements demonstrate higher levels of disclosure. We
investigate whether this effect varies with the legal environment.
The transparency-increasing effect of strong corporate governance
might be reinforced by a strong legal environment, suggesting
a complementary relationship between these two factors with
respect to transparency. However, strong corporate governance
arrangements mayserve as bonding mechanisms in weak legal environments,
suggesting a substitutive relationship between corporate
governance and the regulatory environment. Using a sample of
listed firms from 16 European countries, we find evidence suggesting
that corporate governance arrangements and the legal environment
substitute with respect to their effects on corporate disclosure.