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This study aims to examine the impact of board female participation on Australian firms’ innovation.

Data are from the 500 largest Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)-listed companies for 2004–2015. Measures of innovation concern input (research and development expenditure and intangible assets) and output (patents registered) indicators.

A positive and significant association exists between female director participation and firm innovation activity. This association exists across industry classifications independent of technological importance and is particularly driven by materials and health-care sectors. Findings support calls for more board diversity in line with board female membership positively influencing innovative investment and development activities.

The economic efficacy of the latest revisions to the ASX Corporate Governance Council principles and recommendations (“ASX CGC revisions”) is supported. Diverse boards are a strong source of innovation. Regulators and corporations can use the findings to establish principles and practices that promote female board diversity.

This study is the first to examine the link between board diversity and corporate innovation in Australia where there is under-representation of women on corporate boards and in key management positions. Also lacking are formal legislative or governance policy mandates on board gender diversity. Beyond confirming a positive association between board diversity and levels of corporate innovation, this paper provides new findings that this relationship is driven by women who are non-executive (independent) directors, independent of the underlying technology intensity of firms and moderated by the nature of firm-level profitability and growth opportunities.

This paper aims to examine the association between busy directors on corporate boards and accounting conservatism.

The authors use a sample of 500 firms listed on the Australian Security Exchange from 2004 to 2019. The busyness of non-executive directors is proxied by three indicators. For accounting conservatism, the authors use both conditional and unconditional accounting conservatism via asymmetric timeliness of earnings, accrual-based loss recognition, cumulative total accruals and book-to-market ratio. The authors cluster the standard errors at the firm level to compensate for potential residuals’ dependency and heteroscedasticity, in addition to analysing the main models using year and industry fixed effects (Petersen, 2009). Separately, the authors look at the impact of female busy directors on firms’ adoption of conservative accounting methods. Both propensity score matching analyses and Heckman (1979) two-stage approach systematically address endogeneity issues.

The presence of busy directors on boards leads to greater unconditional conservatism and less conditional conservatism. The relationships between busy female directors with both conditional and unconditional conservatism remain consistent with the main findings.

This paper provides useful insights for shareholders, regulators and accounting standards setters to better evaluate busy directors’ effectiveness in monitoring firms’ financial reporting quality. Directors and the companies themselves can refer to the authors’ findings to decide the best structure for their boards and committees, considering their specific monitoring requirements. Given that no mandatory restriction has been legislated, improved policies or new ones will ensure that busy directors can effectively fulfil their duties.

This research contributes to the broader research theme by examining the influence of directors’ quality on financial reporting conservatism. It also contributes to the ongoing debate in the corporate finance literature regarding the experience and busyness hypotheses of directors with multiple directorships. Additionally, this research adds value to gender diversity research by finding evidence that female busy directors follow the same pattern of reporting conservatism as male busy directors.

This study aims to examine whether or not listed companies' disclosure of intellectual capital is value‐relevant in share markets and to assess its moderating role in the value‐relevance of reported earnings and equity following the adoption of international financial reporting standards (IFRS).

A measure of intellectual capital disclosure (ICD), based on a content analysis of the text in annual reports sampled from listed companies in Britain, Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore, is incorporated in the models to examine the direct and moderating roles of ICD in a firm's valuation.

The results reveal that ICD is positively associated with market price (i.e. has value relevance) in companies in two of the four countries and in non‐traditional industries. Further, the incremental value relevance of earnings and net assets is mostly non‐significant; however, interaction of these variables with ICD considerably increases the basic coefficients and the explanatory power of the models.

Prior research on the value relevance of reported accounting numbers has not considered the incremental effect of textual ICD in annual reports. This study extends value relevance models by combining textual ICD with accounting numbers in an attempt to assess investors' valuation of firms.

From the findings, a case is made for corporate management (particularly in certain countries and industries) to integrate its accounting policy choices regarding good will and intangibles with its strategies for disclosure of broad intellectual capital information.

First‐time evidence is provided that text‐based ICD is value‐relevant in capital markets and on its moderating effect for the value‐relevance of reported accounting numbers.