Board diversity and intellectual capital disclosure in listed firms in Nigeria: The moderating role of ownership concentration

Abstract

This study examines the moderating role of ownership concentration on the relationship between board diversity and intellectual capital of forty-four listed non-financial services firms in Nigeria during the period of ten years from 2011-2020. The descriptive statistics tool was used to obtain summary statistics for the variables in the study. Similarly, ordinary least square regresion was employed to examine the study's hypotheses using STATA 12 software. The finding of the study revealed that board education has a significant positive impact on intellectual capital disclosure. However, board nationality was discovered to have a significant negative impact on intellectual capital disclosure. The study also revealedthat board ownership has no effect on intellectual capital disclosure. The findings from the moderated model revealed that ownership concentration increased the negative impact of board education and board ownership on intellectual capital disclosure. The study recommends that in constituting the boards of these firms, board education background should be given top priority in order to ensure quality decision concerning intellectual capital. Likewise, in order to ensure quality decision making, non-financial services firms in Nigeria should ensure that there is increase in number of foreign members on the board and attend board meeting regularly. Also, there should be regulation as to the percentage of shares held by directors. Finally, management should consider the multiple roles of the concentrated ownership and board diversity when constituting the board. This will enable the management to carefully select, nominate, and appoint members of the board with great diversity which will ultimately lead to disclosure of intellectual capital.