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The purpose of this paper is to argue the relationship between chief sustainability officer, sustainability performance and corporate governance. Specifically, this paper aims to empirically examine the mediation role of corporate governance on the relationship between chief sustainability officer and sustainability performance.

The study sample includes 484 European companies that were listed on STOXX Europe 600 index between 2010 and 2022. There are 15 supersectors and 17 nations.

Results of this study show that the profile of chief sustainability officer has a positive impact on sustainability performance. In addition, the corporate governance mediates the relationship between chief sustainability officer and sustainability performance.

The findings may be of interest to the academic researchers, investors and regulators. For academic researchers, the results would be interesting in discovering the dynamic relation between chief sustainability officer, sustainability performance and corporate governance. For investors, these show that the existence of chief sustainability officer provides sustainability performance from good corporate governance mechanisms. For regulators, these advise the worldwide policy maker to give the importance to chief sustainability officer roles to improve the engagement of firms in sustainability performance reporting.

This paper extends the existing literature by examining the mediation impact of corporate governance on the relationship between chief sustainability officer and sustainability performance in the European context.

This study aims to investigate the direct nexus between board characteristics, corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and the cost of equity capital (CEQ). This is done by using agency theory, stakeholder theory and signalling theory, followed by an investigation into the indirect mediation impact of CSR disclosure in the board characteristics-CEQ nexus. It intends to present new experimental evidence from Jordan’s developing economy.

The study’s target population was services companies registered on the Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) between 2012 and 2020. As a result, the population and sampling of this study are represented by all services companies for whom complete data are available over the period, with a total of 43 services companies yielding 387 company-year observations. Data for our study were obtained from their annual disclosures and the ASE’s database.

The main findings demonstrated that board size, board gender variety and the number of board sessions positively affect CSR disclosure significantly. In addition, three board characteristics (i.e. board size, board independence and board gender variety) significantly negatively affect CEQ. Besides, CSR disclosure significantly negatively affects CEQ and it fully mediates the relationship between two board characteristics (i.e. board size and board gender variety) and CEQ, whereas it partially mediates the nexus between board independence, CEO/Chairman duality and the number of board sessions of board characteristics and CEQ.

This study varies from earlier studies, in that it builds a new research model by looking at the mediating role of CSR disclosure in the nexus among board characteristics and the CEQ.