The School of Economics, Management and Political Science at the University of Minho (EEG) is proud to announce that Sarah Yasser Farouk Abdel-fattah Ahmed, a PhD student in Business Sciences, presented her doctoral thesis entitled “Essays on Integrated Reporting and Opportunistic Corporate Behaviour: the case of South Africa”, on 22 April 2026.
In the author’s own words:
"This thesis examines the effectiveness of Integrated Reporting (IR) as a corporate governance and accountability mechanism, with a specific focus on its role in mitigating managerial opportunistic behavior, in the context of South Africa, the first country to mandate the adoption of IR for listed companies.
The first essay examines the relationship between IR quality and earnings management. While higher IR quality is not associated with accrual-based earnings management, the results reveal persistence of real earnings management, particularly through overproduction.
The second essay explores the association between IR quality and corporate tax avoidance. The findings show no significant overall relationship, supporting the decoupling hypothesis, but reveal that firms producing the highest-quality IR exhibit lower tax avoidance. This highlights that IR can act as a disciplining mechanism only when implemented with genuine commitment and embedded within an ethical corporate culture.
The third essay investigates whether IR quality improves investment efficiency by reducing information asymmetry and agency conflicts. The results indicate that higher IR quality enhances investment efficiency, particularly by mitigating underinvestment. Yet it has no effect on curbing overinvestment, showing that this form of opportunism is less responsive to disclosure improvements, even when reporting quality is high.
Taken together, the findings demonstrate that transparency alone is insufficient to deter opportunistic behavior, as managers may strategically decouple IR disclosures from such opportunistic practices or use IR at a symbolic level to offset some forms of managerial opportunistic behavior. The thesis contributes to theories of decoupling and institutional legitimacy by showing how IR may be adopted symbolically, while also identifying."
The doctoral thesis was supervised by Tânia Montenegro, Professor in the Department of Management at the School of Economics, Management and Political Science, University of Minho.
The EEG congratulates Sarah Yasser Farouk Abdel-fattah Ahmed on her defence and wishes her every success in her professional and personal life!
