Accounting culture and the quality of financial reporting: Corporate governance as a moderator in Palestinian and Jordanian banking sectors

This research presents a hypothesis suggesting that cultural values (conservatism, professionalism, confidentiality and consistency) affect the quality of financial reporting in Palestinian Jordanian banks. It also investigates the moderating role of corporate governance in such a relationship, a gap that is often mentioned in literature on how cultural values interplay with governance mechanisms in emerging markets. The study had an ex-post facto quantitative, cross-sectional plan on a sample of 380 high-ranking employees from the 33 banks in Palestine and Jordan that were chosen through proportionally stratified random sampling. Information was obtained through a validated questionnaire, and analysis was done using Stata software. Direct and moderating effects were tested using multiple linear regression analysis (MLR) and structural equation modeling (SEM). The results indicate that conservatism, professionalism, and consistency had a strong positive impact on financial reporting quality (p < 0.01), while confidentiality had an insignificant influence. Corporate governance strengthened professionalism and conservatism, verifying its moderating effect in transferring cultural values into better reporting quality. All these relationships were well supported in SEM Model fit, validating the stability of the hypothesized model both in theory and in data. This study enriches the cross-cultural accounting literature by empirically linking accounting cultural values with financial reporting quality through governance mechanisms in Arab banking contexts. It extends Institutional and Stakeholder theories, demonstrating that ethical culture and effective governance can jointly sustain transparency and accountability in emerging economies.