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Because of growing corporate tax scandals, there is an enhanced focus on corporate taxation by governments, institutions and the general public. Transparency in tax matters has been identified as critical for effectively managing and promoting socially responsible tax behaviour. This study aims to explore the impact of ownership structure, board and audit committee characteristics on corporate tax responsibility (CTR) disclosure.

This research collected data from the annual reports of Pakistani-listed firms over 12 years, from 2009 to 2020. Consequently, the data set encompasses a total of 1,800 firm-year observations. This study uses regression analysis to test the relationship between corporate governance and CTR disclosure.

The results show that board gender diversity, managerial ownership and audit committee independence promote tax responsibility disclosure. In contrast, family board membership, CEO duality, foreign ownership and family ownership negatively impact tax responsibility disclosure. Additional analyses reveal the specific information categories that produce the overall effects on tax responsibility disclosure and assess the moderating impact of family firms on the governance and CTR disclosure nexus.

Corporations can use the results to encourage practices that enhance transparency and improve the quality of disclosures. Regulatory authorities can use the findings to stipulate better protocols. Doing so will be vital for developing countries such as Pakistan to improve tax revenue and cultivate economic growth.

While this research represents, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, one of the first empirical investigations of the association between corporate governance and CTR, the results contribute to the corporate governance literature and offer fresh insights into CTR, an emerging dimension of corporate social responsibility.

Despite the well-recognized importance of recycled water, the study of industry-peer pressure on recycled water is relatively new. This study investigates how organizations experience and react to industry-peer pressure to set recycled water targets. Additionally, this study investigates the role of board chairs involved in sustainability committees in contributing to responses to industry-peer pressure.

Using Eviews 12, this study employed a pooled logistic regression model to analyze data from 1,346 firms on Taiwan and Taipei exchanges (2017–2020).

The findings revealed that frequency-based imitation drives recycled water target-setting diffusion. However, there is no direct relationship between outcome-based imitation and recycled water target-setting. Notably, outcome-based imitation drives the adoption of recycled water target-setting of firms with board-chair membership in sustainability committees.

This study faces certain data limitations. First, this study primarily focuses on water recycling. Future research could explore other ways to reduce water usage, such as using water-efficient equipment. Second, this study gathered information solely on the presence or absence of a board chairperson on the sustainability committee. Future researchers could explore the impact of the composition of sustainability committee on recycled water target-setting. Lastly, the sample used in this study is restricted to Taiwan's corporations that existed during 2017–2020. Future researchers may consider adopting a longitudinal design in other economies to address this limitation.

The findings of this study offer several guidelines and implications for recycled water target-setting and the composition of sustainability committees. It responds to an urgent call for solutions to water shortages when pressure from governments and nongovernmental organizations is relatively absent. The number of industry peers that have already set recycled water targets is indispensable for motivating firms to set their own recycled water targets. In terms of insufficient water-related regulatory pressure and normative pressure, this study found evidence suggesting that the direct motivation for setting recycled water targets stems from mimetic pressures via frequency-based imitation. The evidence in this study suggests that policymakers should require companies to disclose their peers’ recycled water target information, as doing so serves as an alternative means to achieving SDG 6.3.

Recycled water target-setting might be challenging. Water recycling practices may face strong resistance and require substantial additional resources (Zhang and Tang, 2019; Gao et al., 2019; Gu et al., 2023). Therefore, this study suggests that firms should ensure the mindfulness of board members in promoting the welfare of the natural environment when making recycled water target-setting decisions. To reap the second-mover advantage, firms must consider the conditions in which board members can more effectively play their role. Corporations may help their chairpersons in setting recycled water targets by recruiting them as members of sustainability committees. Meanwhile, chairpersons tend to activate accurate mental models when the water conservation performance of pioneering industry peers is strong enough to indicate the potential benefits of adopting recycled water target-setting. Investors’ and stakeholders’ understanding of how the composition of sustainability committees is related to recycled water target-setting may help to identify the potential drivers of firms’ water responsibility. Investors and stakeholders should distinguish firms in terms of the board chair’s membership of their sustainability committee and focus on water-use reduction outcomes in the industry. This study provides insights into circumstances whereby chairpersons help to restore the water ecosystem.

This study explains how frequency-based and outcome-based imitation are two prominent mechanisms underlying the industry-peer pressure concerning recycled water target-setting. Moreover, this study fills literature gaps related to the moderating roles of board-chair membership in sustainability committees concerning industry-peer pressure on recycled water target-setting.

Reacting to the calls in the contemporary literature to further examine the relationship between board attributes and firms’ decisions to obtain corporate social responsibility assurance (CSRA) through the use of pioneering techniques, this study aims to analyse the influence of such attributes together with the existence of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) committee on the adoption of CSRA using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (Fs-QCA).

Fs-QCA was performed on a sample of nonfinancial European companies listed on the STOXX Europe 600 index over the period 2016–2018.

The study findings indicate that the decision to obtain a CSRA report depends on a complex combination of the influence of the CSR committee and certain board attributes, such as size, experience, independence, meeting frequency, gender and CEO separation. These attributes play essential contributing roles and, if suitably combined, stimulate the adoption of CSRA.

The study findings are important for policymakers, professionals, organisations and regulators in forming and modifying the rules and guidelines related to CSR committees and board composition.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study represents the first examination of the impact of board attributes and CSR committees on the adoption of CSRA using Fs-QCA method. It also offers a novel methodological contribution to the board-CSRA literature by combining traditional statistical (logistic regression) and Fs-QCA methods. This study emphasises the benefits of Fs-QCA as an alternative to logistic regression analysis. Through the use of these methods, the research illustrates that Fs-QCA offers more detailed and informative results when compared to those obtained through logistic regression analysis. This finding highlights the potential of Fs-QCA to enhance our understanding of complex phenomena in academic research.

This study aims to examine how woman leadership (i.e., woman board chairperson, woman chief executive officer (CEO) and board gender diversity) affects audit fee and also ascertained the interactive effect of woman leadership and gender diversity on audit committee on audit fee.

The study applied ordinary least square and fixed-effect estimators on the data of 21 universal banks in Ghana for the period 2010–2021 to estimate the empirical results.

It is revealed that under the leadership of women (woman CEO and board gender diversity), higher external audit quality is ensured as higher audit fee is paid. Interestingly, it was found that with the presence of women on the audit committee, the integrity of internal controls and internal audit procedures are enhanced, which leads to quality financial reporting, calls for lower audit effort, hence lower audit fee.

The result indicates that firms can rely on the leadership of women in ensuring quality external audit and quality financial reporting, which ultimately helps to minimize the information risk to all stakeholders.

The paper contributes to extant literature by establishing that, under the leadership of women in banking entities from a developing country context, external audit quality and financial reporting are achieved.

The modern corporation is evaluated by many measures that go beyond profit, which was the emphasis for years previously. Today’s corporation is weighed against expectations of many stakeholders, including not just customers but employees, investors, the government and even the public at large with no discernible financial or other tie to a company. As such, corporate boards necessarily must be concerned with more than financial performance, including corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the increasing emphasis on environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics. Given that public relations scholars and practitioners have long been concerned with stakeholder relationships, social responsibility and other non-financial indicators, it would make sense that public relations has a more obvious presence on corporate boards.

This study examined the 25 companies in the Fortune Modern Board 25 to determine how many board members had a background or expertise in public relations that would contribute to the leadership necessary for the concerns of the modern corporation, and whether the boards had a committee designated to public relations or related functions.

Results show that there are few corporate boards that have public relations represented prominently in either their members or committees. The same is true for executive leadership teams. Public relations or communications executives do appear to play some role in ESG, CSR and DEI reporting, but often there are staff members with those specific titles and roles.

The study was limited to 25 corporations on a Forbes list that ranked them as best in communicating ESG, CSR and DEI. The method examined publicly available literature which was revealing to the research questions, but more could be learned by interview or survey with CCOs.

The study shows the current presence of public relations capacity in terms of members of corporate boards, corporate committees and among the C-suite is not significant. Also, rather than PR as a function owning modern concerns of DEI, ESG and CSR, there are professionals with specific expertise in those areas who are responsible for those corporate issues.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR), ESG (environmental, social, governance) and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) have recently been stressed as important for corporations to measure and report. The role of the public relations profession in managing and/or communicating in these areas is important to consider in terms of public expectations and satisfaction of communication on these subjects.

This paper is unique in integrating public relations theory and practice with board theory and the current management concerns with ESG, CSR and DEI. Little if any previous research has considered which professions are in charge of communicating on these concerns.

This paper aims to synthesize the diverse literature on nomination and remuneration committees and provide avenues for future research.

This study provides a comprehensive literature review of theoretical and empirical studies published in reputable international journals indexed by Scopus.

The literature review reveals several aspects of the nomination and remuneration committee. These aspects have been classified into the definition of the nomination and remuneration committee, dimensions of the nomination and remuneration committee, measurement and research review results, reasons for conflict empirical findings, company dynamics and research on moderators, as well as recommending future research.

Our literature review shows that nomination and remuneration committees play a role in improving board performance and company performance, reducing agency conflicts and improving corporate governance to provide implications for companies, regulators and investors and pave the way for future research.

This paper identifies issues related to nomination and remuneration committees, their theoretical and practical implications and avenues for future research.

The authors analyze the association between the functional background of the compensation committee chair and CEO compensation. The analysis is motivated by the continuing debate about the reasonableness of executive pay patterns and the growing emphasis on the role of compensation committees.

The authors define three expert categories—accounting, finance, and generalist—and collect data on the compensation committee (CC) chairs of the S&P 500 firms from 2008 to 2018. The authors run an ordinary least square model and regress CEO total and cash compensation on the three expert categories.

The authors find that firms in which the CC chair has expertise in accounting, finance, and general business favor performance measures that are more aligned with accounting, finance, and general business, respectively. There is little evidence that CC chairs who are CEOs of other firms endorse more generous pay for the host CEO; the authors find some evidence that CC chairs tenure relative to the host CEO's is negatively associated with the level of the CEO's pay.

This study suggests that firms and regulators should consider the background of the compensation committee chair to understand the variations in top executive.

Companies desiring to link executive compensation to particular areas of strategy must also consider matching the functional background of the compensation committee chair with the target strategy areas. From regulatory standpoint, requiring compensation committees to operate independent of inside directors can reduce attempts by inside directors to skim the process, but a failure to also consider the impact of compensation committees' discretion over the pay-setting process can distort the executives' pay-performance relation.

This is the first study to examine the effects of the functional background of the compensation committee chair on CEO compensation.

The literature has dealt with the relationship between board characteristics (BC) and firm performance (FP) on a large scale. However, it yielded inconsistent results. Thus, this paper aims to examine the indirect relationship between BC and FP through the mediating role of the capital structure (CS).

This study used a sample of 528 non-financial companies listed on Bursa Malaysia from 2015 to 2019. Also, a two-step system generalised method of moments estimation technique was applied.

The results show that board diversity and the frequency of board meetings positively affect financial performance, and it is negatively influenced by board turnover, size and independence. Also, the results indicate a positive relationship between the independence of the board and all CS variables. Importantly, the findings support the policy-setting role of the board of directors where CS (measured by total debt and short-term debt) suppresses some governance mechanisms’ detrimental effect on FP. Hence, the board of directors, apart from the monitoring function, introduce various policies (financial and non-financial) that enhance the overall performance of companies.

These results are consistent with the agency’s perspective that management practices in selecting the optimal capital reduce agency costs and improve performance. The findings contribute to developing a broader theoretical framework that accounts for the policy-setting role of the board of directors. The current study model of corporate governance offers insight for policymakers into the role of corporate governance other than monitoring functions in organisations and how CS should be taken into consideration with corporate governance and FP association.

The purpose of the study is to examine the relation between board structure and firm performance variability in an international setting. The authors further explore the effect of national culture in shaping such relations.

The authors’ international sample contains 4,911 firms across 49 countries over the 2002–2017 period. The authors use national culture values on individualism and power distance developed by Hofstede (1980, 2001, 2011). The authors focus on within-firm, over-time variability of firm performance and estimate multivariate linear regressions with fixed effects. The authors address the endogeneity concern using the instrumental variable approach, and the authors’ results are robust to alternative measures of variables and different subsamples.

The authors find that firms with larger board size, greater board independence and less powerful CEOs have less variable performance. Individualism has a magnifying effect while power distance has a mitigating effect in shaping such relations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to answer the call of Adams, Hermalin and Weisbach (2010) for research on corporate boards in an international setting. It is also one of the few studies which examine the variability of firm performance, while the majority of existing literature focuses on the level of firm performance. Most importantly, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to explore the role of national culture in shaping boardroom interactions that affect the decision-making process of corporate boards, which, in turn, affects firm performance variability.

This study aims to explore the relationship between institutional and macroeconomic factors and corporate financial flexibility while also investigating the moderating impact of selected board governance mechanisms on this relationship.

The sample of the study comprises 174 firms listed on the Colombo Stock Exchange for a period of eight years, from 2014 to 2021. Data were collected from secondary sources, and both descriptive and inferential statistical techniques were used for analyses.

Corporate financial flexibility is notably affected by profitability as an institutional factor and by gross domestic product growth rate and banking sector development as macroeconomic factors. Furthermore, the relationship between a company’s profitability and corporate financial flexibility is found to be moderated by selected board governance mechanisms. However, these governance mechanisms do not influence the relationship between corporate financial flexibility and other institutional factors (i.e. other than profitability) and macroeconomic factors considered in this study.

This study adds a fresh perspective to the existing body of knowledge in the field of corporate finance by emphasizing the interaction effect of board governance mechanisms on the association between macroeconomic and institutional variables and financial flexibility of firms. The findings are expected to be useful for business decision-makers in managing their corporate financial flexibility effectively and maximizing the use of their financial resources.