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This study aims to investigate the impact of the board’s financial expertise (BFE) on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure in China.

Using a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2009-2016 (making 3272 firm-year observations), this study uses the generalized method of moments (GMM) and panel data estimation techniques.

Using the resource dependence theory, the findings of this study are twofold. First, the is positively associated with the disclosure level of CSR. Second, this positive impact is more pronounced in firms with female CEO and state ownership. The findings are robust to the potential issues of endogeneity and sensitivity analyses.

Practically, the findings hold value for the senior management of Chinese firms to ensure the presence of financial experts in boards to yield both financial and non-financial outcomes.

This study points out how financial experts on boards influence the societal outcomes via disclosure of CSR. Financial experts encourage participation in social and sustainable practices which creates a positive image of the firm not only in the eyes of society but also for investors.

This study is unique and contributes to the extant literature by examining the impact of a new attribute, i.e. the BFE on the level of CSR disclosure in China.

This study aims to examine the effects of agency cost on auditor choice. This paper also deals with the moderating role of the board’s financial expertise (Bfe) and the status of the internal control (Intecon) system on the relationship between agency cost and auditor selection.

This study’s sample consists of 1,040 firm-year observations of Iranian nonfinancial companies listed on the Tehran Stock Exchange from 2012 to 2019. The information required for this research is mainly extracted from Comprehensive Database of All Listed Companies (in Iran Stock Exchange). Data from 130 companies were obtained during the research period. This study used logistic regression to test the hypotheses.

The findings indicate that companies with higher agency costs choose the auditor from lower classes. As the proportion of financial expert members on the board increases, the intensity of this relationship will be reduced. Companies with higher agency costs choose the auditor from the lower classes, but the higher the ratio of financial expert board members, the more these companies will choose high-quality auditors. However, findings showed that the status of the Intecon system has no moderating effect on the relationship between agency costs and auditor selection.

The results of this study can expand the existing literature on the relationship between auditor selection and agency costs and the factors affecting this relationship, especially the Bfe and Intecon. This research has significant suggestions for regulators, stakeholders, shareholders and analysts in emerging economies that may encounter similar contextual implications.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of the revised Code of Corporate Governance 2017 (CCG-2017) clauses pertaining to board independence, mandatory inclusion of female directors, audit committee (AC) chair independence and directors’ expertise on earnings manipulation.

Using an unbalanced panel of 323 listed companies from 2015 to 2019, this study uses panel data regression models with a robust methodology called difference-in-differences to tackle the potential endogeneity.

This study’s findings show that, as compared to the pre-CCG-2017 period, board- and AC-related variables increased significantly in the post-CCG-2017 period. Furthermore, financial experts on the board and board independence have a negative effect on discretionary accruals (DAs), whereas female directors and DAs are positively related, as is real activity manipulation. The AC-related variables, such as AC independence, expertise in AC, and AC chair independence, are significantly different from the preperiod to the postperiod, whereas their relationship is not according to the hypotheses of the study. Moreover, these results are robust to additional analysis of the alternative proxies for female directorship and the endogeneity problem.

The findings of this study have implications for regulators and practitioners who are concerned with the functions of the board of directors (BOD). The findings of this research study show that earnings management (EM) may be reduced by independent and expert directors. However, board gender diversity is not reducing the EM. Therefore, the decision to appoint female directors to the board should be based on their business and professional attributes rather than simply filling quotas or blindly adhering to regulations. Moreover, the findings of this research may assist the regulator in encouraging listed firms to enhance board governance via independence, diversity and competency, which are useful for effective monitoring.

This study fills a gap in the literature by providing the first evidence of country-specific regulation (CCG-2017), concerning the BOD and AC-related clauses on EM in Pakistan, which is missing in the relevant literature general and in Pakistan in particular.

This study aims to examine the relationship between board capital and firm performance in the Chinese tourism industry.

The study’s sample includes firms from the Chinese hotel, air transportation/travel and catering industries. This study explores the governance environment in tourism industries. This study estimates three dimensions of the board, including education, expertise and directors interlock. These dimensions are further grouped as human capital (i.e. education and expertise), social capital (interlocks) and board capital (sum of social and human capital). Ordinary least square regressions with multiple robustness tests are used to investigate the effect of board capital on firm value in Chinese listed tourism firms during 2005–2018.

This study finds that board capital positively impacts firm performance in its dimensions of human and social capital. This study also highlights the two important ownership contexts, namely, institutional investors and state-ownership, that shape the board capital-firm performance association in the Chinese tourism industry.

The findings suggest that board capital plays a significant role in corporate decisions. The results illustrate that higher board capital improves both governance mechanisms and resource provision roles of the board, resulting in higher firm value. The results further offer implications for managers and shareholders of tourism firms when electing directors as shareholders’ representatives.

The study has two important contributions. First, it extends the prior literature of firm value by considering the board’s human and social dimensions in the tourism sector. Second, contrary to prior research on board, this study takes three facets of board capital, education, expertise and interlocks that improve governance mechanisms and bring new resources in the shape of skills, knowledge and expertise.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between the attributes of corporate boards in UK companies and their tendency to assure their corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports.

From the agency theory perspective, the authors examine the impact of board attributes on the assurance of CSR reports for the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 350 during 2016–2019. The authors used annual integrated reports, companies’ websites and Thomson Reuters Eikon database for data collection and the logistic regression for data analysis.

The results confirm that some board attributes significantly influence a company’s decision to assure its CSR reports. While board size, board tenure, the presence of female board members and female executive directors and Chief Executive Officers (CEOs)’ global working experience positively contribute to CSR assurance (CSRA) decisions, the chairman’s independence negatively contributes to it. However, board independence, board meetings and board financial expertise demonstrate no effect on the CSRA decision.

The authors focus on some attributes of board members, but the authors did not consider board diversity in its broader meaning. Moreover, the effect of board committees and their attributes on CSRA was not addressed. The authors also did not consider the impact of scope, the quality level of assurance service and the differences between assurance providers on companies’ decisions to neither undertake CSRA nor choose between assurance providers.

The study provides insights into the increasing demand on voluntary assurance to boost the credibility of CSR reports and the role of the board of directors (BOD) in taking this initiative. The findings highlight the importance of board diversity (e.g. gender) in improving transparency and sustainability reporting, which can help policymakers and regulators in shaping future governance policies. Additionally, the findings refer to a drawback in the UK Corporate Governance Code regarding the chairman’s independence, which requires corrective actions from the Financial Reporting Council. The findings raise concern over the small share of audit firms in the assurance service market, despite the growing demand for these services in the UK, which may require more attention to these services from the audit firms.

Companies are increasingly pressurized, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic, to discharge their accountability to stakeholders and to act in a socially responsible manner in their business activities. CSR reporting is one of the main tools that companies use to communicate their social activities. Understanding the determinants of voluntary CSRA helps to increase the credibility of CSR reports and the favorable response to social pressure.

The authors add empirical evidence to the limited literature on CSRA about the role of the BOD in undertaking companies’ social responsibility, improving CSR reporting and reducing information asymmetry. It also highlights the significance of maintaining a balanced BOD in terms of gender, experience and tenure, in minimizing the risk of perpetuating non-transparent integrated reporting.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the impact of corporate governance on intellectual capital (IC) in companies listed on the Tehran stock exchange.

In this paper, the board features (size, independence and CEO duality) and the characteristics of the audit committee (financial expertise, independence and size) are considered to measure the factors of corporate governance. The IC is also divided into communicative, human, structural and value-added IC. Research data are gathered using a sample of 132 companies during 2013-2016. Research hypotheses are analyzed using panel data and logistic regression models.

The findings indicate that while the board’s independence, financial expertise and the size of the audit committee are negatively related to the communicative capital, the relationship between audit committee independence and communicative capital is positive and significant. Further, the authors observe that there is a positive relationship between board independence and human capital, a negative and significant link between audit committee size and human capital. By the way, the results reveal that audit committee independence and audit committee size have, respectively positive and negative impact on structural capital.

The results of the current study may give more insight into the relationship between corporate governance and managerial capital in developing nations.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the impact of board financial expertise on the shareholding of foreign institutional investors in an emerging equity market of China and to explore whether ownership concentration moderates the relationship between board financial expertise and foreign institutional investment.

To test the hypothesized relationships, this study uses panel data regression models, i.e. static (fixed effect and random effect) and dynamic (two-step generalized methods of moments) models. Further, to control the possible endogeniety issue, this study uses two instrumental variables, namely, board size and industry average financial expertise of board to proxy board financial expertise. This study covers a period from 2006 to 2015 for 169 listed Chinese firms.

The results revealed that foreign institutional investors positively perceived board financial expertise and holds more shareholdings with the increasing level of financial experts at boards of directors. Moreover, ownership concentration positively moderated this relationship. It means that in highly concentrated firms, the board financial expertise conveys a stronger signal to foreign institutional investors that firms can manage financial resources rationally by controlling negative effects of ownership concentration. Further, the robustness model also confirmed the relationship between board financial expertise and foreign institutional shareholdings.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to investigate board-level financial expertise as a determinant of foreign institutional ownership. Further, no previous study has used ownership concentration as a contextual variable on the relationship between board financial expertise and foreign institutional investment.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship of the board and risk committee in respect of risk-taking in conventional and Islamic banks in Malaysia.

This study uses unbalanced panel data for 15 conventional and 14 Islamic banks over the period 2007–2016. The generalised least squares random effects technique is applied.

The evidence shows that independent directors and frequency of board meetings reduce risk-taking but that the number of directors with finance and banking experience and those with multiple directorships tend to increase risk-taking. The findings also indicate that the size of the risk committee, the number of directors on the risk committee and the appointment of a designated risk officer tends to reduce risk-taking in banks. By comparing conventional and Islamic banks, the findings show that Islamic banks have lower exposure to portfolio risk but higher insolvency risk.

The findings in this study suggest that the board and risk committee have an impact on bank risk-taking. The implications for management include having more independent directors, fewer directors with multiple board memberships and having an efficient risk committee in order to reduce risks. Regulators should look into the issue of multiple directorships as this is positively related to risk-taking. Islamic banks should expand their operations as our findings indicate that bigger banks are better able to manage risk.

This study covers bank governance and risk committee, which are crucial in influencing the risk-taking behaviour of conventional and Islamic banks.

This study aims to investigate the influence of board characteristics on sustainability reporting among listed firms in East Africa.

The study uses a sample of 79 listed firms drawn from East African securities exchanges and data from 2011 to 2020. Sustainability reporting is measured using Global Reporting Initiative, and the data is analyzed by using three-panel data estimation models – fixed effect, random effect and the generalized method of moments.

The results reveal that board gender diversity, board financial expertise and board independence are positively and significantly associated with sustainability reporting. Conversely, board size has a negative and significant effect on sustainability reporting.

The findings from the study provide valuable insights to firm owners and policymakers. The study highlights the importance of directors with financial knowledge, a high proportion of non-executive directors and women representation in board and smaller boards as a strategy that will help firms improve sustainability practices and reporting in East Africa.

Results of this study underscore the effect of corporate governance (CG) dimensions on social responsibility activities, such as philanthropy, emission reduction and waste management initiatives as reported through sustainability responsibility.

This study adds to the growing literature on the relationship between CG attributes and sustainability reporting from a developing economy perspective. Specifically, the study examines how board gender diversity, size, independence and financial expertise affect sustainability reporting adoption.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the public pension governance practices on the public defined benefit pension (DBP) fund performance.

To provide a holistic evaluation of public DBP performance, this study first employs the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach to construct a relative performance measure that simultaneously takes into account the association between investment inputs and performance outputs across DBPs in our sample. A DEA regression model is then constructed to empirically examine the impact of pension governance on public DBP performance.

Using 1,544 hand-collected observations in the USA from 2002 to 2013, the findings show that the public DBP plans with a small board, appointed board trustees, and a separate investment council exhibit better performance.

The effectiveness of pension governance has increasingly drawn public attention, as it affects the performance of the public DBP plans that especially matter to public employees. The empirical findings of this research offer insights into recent calls to reexamine public DBP management practices and to carry out related public pension fund policy reforms.

The examination of public DBP governance practices in this study enriches the governance literature, particularly research on public pension funds, by using public sector data. Second, by applying the DEA method to evaluate the relative performance of public DBP funds, this study obtains a more comprehensive analysis of the public pension governance.