Search results

This article aims to answer two research questions that remain controversial in the accounting and corporate governance literature: (1) how corporate disclosure is related to board monitoring and (2) how this link is affected by the institutional environment and firm-level governance.

The study is based on S&P data on corporate disclosure by Russian companies collected over 2002–2010 and supplemented by information from the SKRIN database. The dataset covers 125 non-financial companies, with 559 observations in total. We use three indicators of board monitoring: the percentage of non-executive directors, a dummy for two-tier boards, and a dummy for an audit committee. The firm’s governance is proxied by a dummy for single class stock, while the institutional environment is proxied by a dummy for ADRs/GDRs. We apply conventional methods of panel data analysis with several robustness checks, including the random- and fixed-effects models, 2SLS that addresses the potential endogeneity of board composition, alternative definitions of the dependent variable, and an extended list of controls.

We find a positive (complementary) relationship between the amount of disclosure and the proxies for board monitoring employed. This complementary relationship turns out to be the strongest among companies that have better internal governance but face a weaker institutional environment. There is little evidence of such complementarity under strong institutions.

The findings may be of interest to investors and policymakers. As to the former, the results warn of firms that provide limited disclosure in the presence of strong corporate governance arrangements, such as independent boards, as these factors are not substitutes for each other. As to the latter, the results support comprehensive policies aimed at simultaneous improvements in both board governance and corporate disclosure in weak institutional settings.

This paper uses a unique setting and rich, partly proprietary data to extend the existing literature on the relationship between corporate disclosure and board monitoring, with an emphasis on the moderating role of the institutional environment and firm-level governance. It is also one of the very few studies of corporate disclosure in Russia, an important emerging economy of the early 2000s.

This paper aims to delve into the nuanced relationship between corporate governance dynamics, human capital disclosure and their impact on the competitive positioning of Japanese listed companies. The study primarily examines how these factors influence employee engagement, a critical determinant of overall business competitiveness.

Panel data for Japanese listed companies for FY 2019 to FY 2021 were analysed using multiple regression analyses with two models.

The results indicate that the presence of independent and female board members has a positive impact on human capital disclosure. Surprisingly, employee engagement was found to be negatively related with human capital disclosure, signifying a potential trade-off between transparency and engagement.

Amidst the escalating emphasis on non-financial information and corporate social responsibility, this paper unveils a previously underexplored aspect of Japanese corporate competitiveness. Specifically, this study offers a fresh empirical perspective on the relationship between corporate governance, human capital disclosure and employee engagement in Japanese listed companies, a topic with limited academic research and no legal regulations in Japan. The findings have significant implications for companies seeking to enhance their human capital disclosure and employee engagement practices, especially in light of the growing focus on non-financial information and social responsibility.

In Canada, companies are focusing on corporate governance as an ethical response to accounting scandals and the resulting crisis of confidence. Although, many aspects of corporate governance remain free from strict regulation, we examine the voluntary changes in the disclosures of the largest Canadian companies. We attempt to understand, through disclosure theory, discourse analysis, and structuration theory, the quality of these corporate governance disclosures. We recognize that much of the disclosure is opportunistic as companies state that they have not only complied with the non-compulsory Canadian guidelines, but have also met and exceeded the requirements of U.S. regulators. This is an important finding that supports the notion that Canadian companies do not need rules and regulations. Instead, a culture of governance is developing at the boards of large companies that encourages voluntary change. Whether this is enough to prevent future accounting scandals is a question for future research.

This study aims to determine the influence of corporate governance characteristics on carbon emission disclosure in an emerging economy.

The study is based on S&P BSE 500 Indian firms for the period of 6 years from 2016–2017 to 2021–2022. The panel data regression models are used to gauge the association between corporate governance and carbon emission disclosure.

The empirical findings of the study support the positive and significant association between board activity intensity, environment committee and carbon emission disclosure. This evinced that the board activity intensity and presence of the environment committee have a critical role in carbon emission disclosure. On the contrary, findings reveal a significant and negative relationship between board size and carbon emission disclosure.

The present study provides treasured insights to regulators, policymakers, investors and corporate managers, as the study corroborates that various corporate governance characteristics exert significant influence on carbon emission disclosure.

The current research work provides novel insights into corporate governance and climate change literature that good corporate governance significantly boosts the carbon emission disclosure of firms. Previous studies examining the impact of corporate governance on carbon emission disclosure ignored emerging economies. Thus, the current work explores the role of governance mechanisms on carbon emission disclosure in an emerging context. Further, to the best of the author’s knowledge, the current study is the first of its kind to investigate the role of corporate governance on carbon emission disclosure in the Indian context.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the corporate governance information disclosed by Spanish listed companies on the internet, with the objective of assessing the extent and the influence of several corporate characteristics on the level of information voluntarily disclosed.

The study took as its reference the existing literature on the examination of the quality of web sites and the importance of content as a key variable in determining web site quality. To quantify the corporate governance information disclosed by Spanish listed companies, three transparency indexes were designed. To contrast which variables determine the information provided online, the investigation based itself on studies about voluntary disclosure in companies, and three lineal regressions models and an ANOVA analysis were performed.

The empirical evidence obtained reveals that the firms that score highest for transparency are also those that are most likely to use the internet as a channel for the disclosure of corporate governance information. The results show that disclosure levels depend on the degree to which firms are followed by analysts, their listing age, their “visibility” and the fact of belonging to the communications and information services industry.

The need for this study was clear in view of the increasing interest shown by supervisory authorities for the oversight of the European and US capital markets in regulating not only the content but also the manner in which corporate governance information is disclosed over the internet. During the coming years, regulatory stock market agencies will have to strive to take advantage of the opportunities that the internet offers to increase both the relational and informational capacity of company web sites.

Corporate governance research has focused mainly on the analysis of the information that firms ought to disclose and the effects of disclosure generally, without considering the media involved. This paper suggests a new approach that examines the relevance of technology, particularly the internet, and orients supervisory authorities in the direction to follow for improving corporate governance transparency in listed companies.

The study aims to analyze the level of the disclosure of corporate governance practices by the companies that belong to the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries according to normative recommendations and coercive requirements considering the enforcement of laws and norms in the different legal systems and to explain it in the light of the institutional theory approach.

The practices disclosed by a sample of the 20 largest companies listed on the stock exchanges of each of the BRICS countries were analysed, and the 52 practices recommended by UNCTAD (2009) were used as a parameter. The corporate governance practices of the companies were confronted with the laws, rules and norms that require or recommend their adoption and disclosure.

China has 49 practices required by own national law in face of 52 recommended by UNCTAD/International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) followed by South Africa with 44, Russia with 33, Brazil with 28 and India with 24. Brazil has 47 practices recommended by own national governance code in face of 52 recommended by UNCTAD/Intergovernmental Working group of Experts on International Standards of Accounting and Reporting (ISAR), followed by Russia with 45, China with 44, South Africa with 41 and India with 22. It was found that Brazil has the higher median of number of companies disclosing corporate governance practices with 17, followed by India with 13, Russia with 11, South Africa and China with 7.

This research shows that more studies are necessary using the institutional theory to investigate how the normative and coercive pressures influence the disclosure of corporate governance information considering the enforcement of laws and norms in the different legal systems.

The differences observed in this study about normative and coercive forces are presented as an opportunity in the legal sphere of some countries to implement mechanisms to increase their level of enforcement.

This research contributes to various audiences such as governmental institutions, professional associations, market institutions to better understand their role in the improvement of the adoption of corporate governance practices and disclosure of information related to it.

This work aims to analyze and observe the trends in the literature on corporate governance and disclosure. The study presents bibliometric analyses from the Scopus database for the period 1991–2020.

A bibliometric analysis is conducted on 1,697 studies on corporate governance and disclosure across several countries. The articles were assessed and visualized with Vosviewer based on the authors, sources and countries with the highest publication rate, journals with the most published research and highly cited articles and authors.

The analyses provide a comprehensive outlook of the field, and the results show the dominance of documents on corporate governance and disclosure in 2020. The results have been discussed with avenues for further research.

This paper focuses on corporate governance and disclosure research from the Scopus database to highlight the extensive and somewhat ignored areas in extant literature. This would aid upcoming researchers in identifying scholars in the field when exploring future research avenues to close ensuing gaps.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of corporate governance on voluntary disclosure of different types of information in annual reports of Malaysian listed firms.

A linear regression model is used to test the association between the level of voluntary disclosure of five key information categories and corporate governance. The sample consists of 100 firms over three different socio‐economic periods: 1996, 2001 and 2006.

There are significant increases in all the key information categories with better communication most pronounced between 1996 and 2001, and a noticeably lower level of communication growth between 2001 and 2006. The strength of a firm's corporate governance structure clearly influences the voluntary disclosure of information relating to corporate and strategic directions, directors and senior management, financial and capital markets, forward‐looking projections and corporate social responsibility in 2001 and 2006.

The use of a governance index to arrive at an overall corporate governance score has the potential to mask major underlying relationships of individual governance attributes. The use of the self‐constructed disclosure indices may also omit certain information items that are employed in other prior studies. Moreover, the different categories of disclosures are solely constructed on the information disclosed in the annual reports without considering the alternative avenues.

The results will assist regulators and policy‐makers to better understand the impact of corporate governance on the voluntary disclosure of different types of corporate information in Malaysia.

This study generates evidence of the changing scene of management voluntary disclosure practices embedded in the corporate governance framework in a developing country with an emerging capital market.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the association between corporate governance mechanisms and quality of forward-looking information in the Chinese stock market which presents a mandatory disclosure environment for forward-looking information.

Using sales forecasts to proxy forward-looking information and using precision and accuracy to measure the quality of information disclosure, the authors investigate the impact of corporate governance attributes on the precision and accuracy of sales forecasts made by listed Chinese firms in their 2010 annual reports, using logistics and ordinary least squares regressions.

The authors find good corporate governance has a positive and significant impact on the precision choice of sales forecasts disclosure. Firms with good corporate governance are more likely to disclose more precise sales forecasts than providing qualitative discussions on firms’ sales trend. In addition, good corporate governed firms are found more likely to provide precise non-financial information. The authors also find that good corporate governance is positively associated with making more conservative sales forecasts disclosure. However, the authors find no significant relationship between good corporate governance and smaller forecast error.

The study makes significant contributions to corporate disclosure literature. The authors investigate the determinants of the quality of forward-looking information in a mandatory disclosure regime while most forward-looking information disclosure literature have been conducted in a voluntary-based disclosure environment. The authors examine whether in a mandatory disclosure regime, corporate governance mechanisms can play a positive role in precision choices and accuracy of forward-looking information. Further, the study is the first to examine corporate governance and the quality of non-financial forward-looking information (sales target and production goal). The research findings therefore extend forward-looking information disclosure research from financial information to non-financial information.

The empirical findings will provide regulators with evidence on the quality of forward-looking information in a mandatory disclosure regime and the influence of corporate governance on forward-looking disclosure. The properties of forward-looking information disclosure in China should be of interest to policy makers, investors and financial analysts in other international jurisdictions.

The study investigates forward-looking information in a mandatory disclosure regime while most extant forward-looking information studies have been conducted in a voluntary disclosure environment. The study is the first to examine the quality of non-financial forward-looking information such as operational goals and plans, and to investigate the association between the quality of non-financial forward-looking information and corporate governance mechanisms. The research findings extend forward-looking information disclosure research from quantitative financial information to quantitative non-financial information.

This paper aims to examine the influence of corporate governance mechanisms on the extent of intellectual capital (IC) disclosure among companies listed on the Kuwait Stock Exchange (KSE).

A content analysis approach was used. The association between dependent and independent variables was examined using multiple regression analysis.

The results suggest that corporate governance mechanisms strongly influence the quantity of IC information disclosed in the annual reports of KSE-listed companies. Specifically, companies with larger boards, higher proportions of external directors and higher blockholder ownership are associated with higher levels of IC disclosure.

The findings highlight the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms in promoting IC disclosure. They are a useful guideline for regulators, company management and shareholders regarding corporate governance mechanisms that influence the extent of IC disclosure. Given recent Kuwaiti Government initiatives to promote transparency and the informational efficiency of the stock market, this research provides timely empirical evidence in support of these initiatives.

In the frontier market context, the study contributes to a theoretical understanding of the corporate reporting of IC and the relationship between IC disclosure and corporate governance mechanisms. The findings provide empirical support for the theoretical notion that effective corporate governance plays an important role in increasing the extent of voluntary disclosure.