Corporate Governance and Voluntary Disclosure: A Synthesis of Empirical Studies

Abstract

Voluntary disclosure (VD) is considered potentially important for efficient functioning of the capital market as it communicates firms’ performance and governance to shareholders and potential investors, which boost their confidence. This article attempts to provide a brief conceptual framework of VD and corporate governance (CG), and also reviews the empirical literature dealing with relationship between them. To this end, the article uses systematic electronic literature search method, which takes into account 65 empirical studies published over the period 1998–2018. An investigation of empirical findings points to some factors that may have contributed toward the apparent inconsistent findings observed to date. In particular, the article focuses on two intervening factors for variation of results—such as CG system and measurement of explanatory variables. The findings suggest that studies mostly from Anglo-Saxon system (ASS) show complementary relationship between different attributes of CG with VD, whereas in case of communitarian system, studies mostly depict an insignificant impact of CG attributes on VD except for few studies showing their positive/negative impact on VD. However, in case of emerging market system (EMS), some studies show substitutive relationship between board independence (BI) and VD while other CG attributes such as board size (BS), (GD), and audit committee independence (ACI) in most of the studies complement VD supporting the resource-based perspective. Furthermore, the association of ownership structure (OS) and role duality (RD) with VD is mixed. Another factor, which is considered to be added to variation of results, is measurement of explanatory variables whereby albeit studies employed same concepts, operational definition of variables intervenes into the relationship between CG and VD. The findings of this article provide some deeper insights about the complementary and substitutive relationships between CG and VD by integrating diverse empirical findings under different research contexts. Future research can extend to analyze some other institutional factors like investors’ protection rights and legal enforcement, which might also have played some role in influencing the relationship between CG and VD. Furthermore, it is also evident from the review that BS and BI are the most commonly studied CG attributes in relation to VD, whereas attributes like GD and ACI, despite their theoretical relevance and practical importance are least studied in relation to VD, thus signaling the need to focus on these attributes in future studies.