Board Characteristics, Ownership Structure and Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosures : Evidence from ADX-Listed Companies

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) concept has gained great attention both in the media and academic community in the last few decades. This paper sheds light on the relationship between social disclosures and corporate governance mechanisms, mainly ownership structure and board of directors characteristics. The results derived, using a sample of sixty-one firms listed on ADX for the period 2010-2014 and computing an eight-item index, viz., Environment (ENV), Human Resources (HR), Customer-Supplier relationship (CS), Product-Service quality (PS), Community Services (COMS), Corporate Governance (CG), Energy saving (ENG), Finance and Investment (FI) disclosures, are conclusive and show that corporate governance mechanisms have significant impact on CSR disclosures. Mainly, managerial ownership, independent directors, governmental ownership, audit committee size, firm size and leverage positively impact the level of CSR disclosures. In contrast, CEO duality, block holders and the proportion of capital owned by the first shareholder negatively impact the extent of CSR disclosures. Finally, board size, board gender diversity, foreign and listing status and firm profitability have no significant impact on the extent of CSR disclosures. The results remain unchanged to additional robustness checks such as alternative estimation method and CSR disclosure proxy. The findings help in guiding regulators in issuing new standards on social and environmental disclosures