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This paper aims to examine the relationship between audit committee (AC) independence and AC meeting frequency in an emerging country where the presence of majority independent directors (IDs) on AC is a voluntary requirement.

This study uses the agency theory framework to examine the relationship between AC independence and AC meeting frequency. The empirical evidence is provided by a unique hand-collected sample of Bangladeshi listed companies. Multivariate regression analysis is used to test the relationship. Robustness checks provide further empirical support.

This paper finds a positive and significant relationship between AC independence and AC meeting frequency. This is consistent with the notion that IDs are better monitors and demand more frequent AC meetings to protect their reputations. However, having at least two IDs does not significantly affect the number of AC meetings in family firms. This evidence questions director independence in family firms.

This is a single-country study. Therefore, the findings may not apply to other countries with different institutional settings.

Unlike most prior studies, this study is based on a voluntary institutional setting where the companies are not required to have ACs comprising the majority of IDs. In such a setting, the authors find a significantly positive association between AC independence and meeting frequency compared to either a negative or insignificant relationship in the prior literature.

This study aims to examine the association between mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) regulations (CSR mandate) and social disclosures (SOCDS) in India. It also investigates whether CSR committees mediate the relationship between CSR mandate and SOCDS. Furthermore, this paper explores how business group (BG) affiliation moderates CSR committee quality and SOCDS.

This study uses a data set of 5,345 observations from the Bombay stock exchange (BSE)-listed firms over 10 years (2011–2020) to examine the research questions. Baron and Kenny’s (1986) three-step model is estimated to examine the mediating role of CSR committees on the relationship between CSR mandate and SOCDS.

The study reveals that the CSR mandate positively impacts SOCDS in India due to coercive pressures. CSR committees mediate this relationship, with higher CSR committee quality leading to increased SOCDS. Furthermore, the authors report that SOCDS in India is positively related to CSR committee quality, and this relationship is stronger for BG firms. Finally, the supplementary analysis reveals that promoting CSR committee quality enhances firms’ likelihood of meeting CSR mandatory spending and actual CSR spending in India.

This research contributes to the academic literature by shedding light on the intricate dynamics of CSR mandates, CSR committees and SOCDS in emerging economies. Notably, the authors identify the previously unexplored mediation role of CSR committees in the link between CSR mandates and SOCDS. The creation of a composite index that measures complementary CSR committee attributes allows us to undertake a novel assessment of CSR committee quality. An examination of the moderating influence of BG affiliation documents the importance of CSR committee quality, particularly in governance, for enhancing SOCDS transparency within BG firms.

Grounded in lemon market theory, this paper aims to examine the influence of corporate governance (CG) on stock market liquidity in Bangladesh, where stock market manipulation because of speculative trading is a common concern.

This study is based on a sample of 2,420 firm-year observations covering all non-financial firms in Bangladesh from 1996 to 2011.

This study’s results show a significant relationship between governance and liquidity within firms over time. In particular, within firms, when governance quality increases, liquidity significantly improves. For instance, a rise in the governance quality by one standard deviation decreases the illiquidity ratio by 55.97%. The results are unlikely to be confounded by endogeneity.

The results have important policy implications for security regulators, investors, traders and managers. The results support the current regulatory trend of strengthening CG practices in the listed firms in Bangladesh.

This study contributes to the understanding of the role of effective firm-level CG on stock liquidity in the context of an emerging country. Consistent with prior research mostly conducted in the advanced economies, it provides further empirical support that higher CG quality reduces the information asymmetry problem and enhances stock liquidity even in a speculative market.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between board gender diversity and private firm performance.

The authors test the association between board gender diversity and private firm performance by estimating pooled multivariate regressions using an unbalanced panel data set of 115,253 firm-year observations.

The authors find that younger, less busy and local women directors enhance private firm performance. Firms with 40% or more women directors report triple the economic benefits compared to boards with at least 20% women directors. Considering firm size, women directors significantly increase small firm profitability, and the effect is more pronounced for high-risk firms. Greater board gender diversity enhances small firm performance as the monitoring role of women directors benefits the firm even in the presence of busy men directors. Consistent with the agency theory framework, the authors find that women directors improve small firm profitability in the presence of agency costs.

Due to the lack of availability of data about private firms, many factors are not directly observable. The analysis uses accounting-based performance measures that may be subject to managerial discretion. Nevertheless, the authors report highly significant results using cash-based performance measures that substantiate the overall findings.

The results of the present study point to the need for private firms to increase board gender diversity and consider women director busyness, age, nationality and firm size when making board director appointments.

This study adds to the scarce existent literature investigating private firms. The results contribute to the understanding of gender-diverse boards as well as the attributes of women directors that enhance private firm performance.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of female director affiliations to governing families on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures in the context of Bangladeshi firms.

This study uses a quantitative empirical research method grounded in Socioemotional Wealth (SEW) theory. Data was sourced from Bangladeshi publicly listed non-financial sector companies’ annual reports and stock exchange trading and publication reports and consists of 2,637 firm-year observations from 1996 to 2011. Pooled multivariate regression models are used to test the association between corporate social and environmental disclosure and female directors, and the family affiliation (or not) of those directors.

The findings provide strong evidence that female directors who are affiliated to the governing family, founders and other board members reduce CSR disclosure in family firms; unaffiliated female board directors enhance CSR disclosure, and this effect is significant in both family and non-family firms.

Definitions of family firms and affiliated directors may lead to over-generalization in the results.

The study highlights variation in the nature of female board appointments in emerging market family-controlled firms. The findings bring attention to the role of affiliated female director appointments in family ownership structures and speak directly to family business owners, advisors and policy makers about the importance of unaffiliated female directors as catalysts of improved CSR disclosure in family and non-family firms.

This paper investigates the influence of CEO power on financial statement comparability using a multidimensional CEO power index and a comprehensive measure of financial statement comparability for ASX-listed companies.

This study applies ordinary least squares regression analyses to a sample of 3,562 firm-year observations spanning 2004–2015. A propensity score matching procedure, lagged regression models, instrumental variable two-stage least squares regressions and first difference models were performed for endogeneity correction and robustness purposes.

The results suggest that powerful CEOs are more likely to produce more comparable financial reports. We also analyse four dimensions of CEO power and find that the influence of CEO power on FS comparability mainly stems from ownership and expert power dimensions. Additionally, we report that the influence of CEO power on FS comparability is more pronounced for firms that operate under high market competition and industry-related shocks, but governance characteristics do not make a material impact on the uncovered relationship.

Given the pressure exerted by regulatory bodies on companies to reduce information asymmetry, the study’s empirical evidence offers valuable insights to policymakers, corporations and other stakeholders as it provides evidence on the importance of corporate leadership in improving FS comparability.

The extent to which CEO power is linked with the comparability of corporate disclosures is new to the literature. Investigating such a link is important because corporate disclosure is primarily a management practice that emanates from the board and generally affects the firm, its shareholders and other market participants.

Countries globally have implemented policies or regulations promoting greater gender diversity in boardrooms. We investigate whether gender diversity on corporate boards leads to higher Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) commitment through these disclosures.

Using 16,659 firm-year observations across 42 countries for the years 2019 and 2020, we use disclosure data from the Refinitiv database to measure the sample firms’ stated commitment to sustainable development.

Our data provide useful comparative information on the countries, legal jurisdictions and types of SGDs currently being disclosed. Our analyses reveal that gender diverse boards are associated with greater levels of SDG disclosures, with such commitment being more significant when there is more than one woman on the board. We also find that women board members are associated most with the PEOPLE and PLANET groups within the SDGs, and our results are robust to additional analyses and endogeneity concerns.

Although gender diversity has been examined within a corporate social responsibility and ethical, social and governance lens, this examination needs to be extended to the SDGs, given the latter’s multi-year horizon and involvement from governments, the private sector and a very broad cross-section of the global community. Our results reinforce global calls for increasing gender representation at the highest levels of organisations to meet the expectations of a greater range of stakeholders in terms of SDG commitment.

Higher real earnings management (REM) reduces financial reporting quality and increases the uncertainty of future cash flows and profitability among investors. This study asserts that REM-induced noise increases idiosyncratic return volatility (IVOL), aims to examine the association between REM and IVOL and further investigates whether information asymmetry, firm life cycle and economic policy uncertainty (EPU) moderate the association between REM and IVOL.

The authors use 94,445 firm-year observations from the US over 1987 to 2019 and test this study’s hypotheses using ordinary least square regressions with robust standard errors clustered by firm. The authors use change analysis, two-stage models and the impact threshold of the confounding variable analysis to address endogeneity.

The authors find that REM increases IVOL. This positive association is more pronounced for firms with more information asymmetry, for firms in the mature stage of the life cycle, compared with their growth-stage counterparts; and during periods of high EPU.

Extant research suggests that accrual manipulation increases IVOL. However, the shift from accrual manipulation to REM and the managerial preference towards REM suggests that it is important to explore the impact of REM on IVOL. Thus, the authors enhance the understanding of the impact of earnings management on IVOL by documenting that REM-induced noise increases IVOL. The authors further extend the limited research on the consequences of REM and report an adverse consequence.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impacts of board gender composition, board independence and the existence of a board sustainability committee on the corporate social and environmental performance of Australian firms.

The dataset comprises 2,188 Australian Securities Exchange listed firm-year observations (407 individual firms) from 2004 to 2015. The ASSET4 environmental, social and governance database is used to measure corporate social and environmental performance and their sub-dimensions.

Our results show that firms with higher board gender composition, greater board independence and sustainability committees tend to have better social and environmental performance. This paper also provides empirical evidence of the positive association of these variables on the sub-dimensions of social and environmental performance. The results are robust after controlling for self-selection and various forms of endogeneity.

This is the first study that examines the relationship between sustainability committees and corporate social and environmental performance in the context of Australia. This study also overcomes the relatively small sample size and shorter study period issues of similar studies in Australia that provide inconclusive evidence on the relationship between each of board gender composition, board independence and corporate social and environmental performance.

This paper aims to examine the association between environmental disclosure and waste performance.

This study is based on a sample of S&P 500 firms over a nine-year period from 2010 to 2018. The pooled ordinary least squares (OLS), logistic, propensity score matching (PSM) and instrumental variable-generalized method of moments regressions analyses have been used to examine the data.

The findings show a significant positive relationship between waste performance and environmental disclosure, suggesting that firms with superior waste performance tend to disclose more environmental information. Further, the authors distinguish between “hard” and “soft” environmental disclosures and find that the effect of waste performance is consistently positive and significant for each type. The observed positive and significant association of waste performance with environmental disclosure remains unchanged, regardless of the industry affiliation of firms, although firms from industries that are less environmentally sensitive provide a slightly higher level of environmental disclosure. The authors also explore possible channels that may explain the association between waste performance and environmental disclosure and find that litigation risk and cash holdings positively moderate the association. The finding remains robust to a number of alternative estimation approaches.

Overall, the authors present important evidence that waste performance is an important indicator of environmental disclosure. The findings are useful for corporations and stakeholders and have important implications around the globe as the authors continue to grapple with the ongoing issue of waste.