Board Independence and Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure: The Mediating Role of the Presence of Family Ownership

Shashank Bansal, Maria Victoria Lopez-Perez and Lázaro Rodríguez-Ariza
Additional contact information
Shashank Bansal: Department of Management Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, 600036 Chennai, India
Maria Victoria Lopez-Perez: Department of Financial Economics and Accounting, University of Granada, 18010 Granada, Spain

Administrative Sciences, 2018, vol. 8, issue 3, 1-21

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of board independence on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and analyses the moderating effect of the presence of family ownership. Using an international sample from 29 countries from 2006 to 2014, our panel Tobit estimation shows that board independence is negatively associated with CSR disclosure practices and they present opposition to CSR disclosure practices. However, family ownership moderates the relationship and enforces the positive orientation of independent directors towards CSR disclosure. This shows that the presence of family ownership reduces independent director concern of reputation risks associated with receiving misleading information and family firms decrease the asymmetries of information between the independent director and management. The study also finds that independent directors encourage CSR disclosure in family firms more in civil law countries where investor protection is low compared to common law countries where investor protection is high.

Keywords: family business; independent directors; corporate social responsibility; voluntary disclosure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L M M0 M1 M10 M11 M12 M14 M15 M16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/8/3/33/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/8/3/33/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jadmsc:v:8:y:2018:i:3:p:33-:d:156481

Access Statistics for this article

Administrative Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Nancy Ma

More articles in Administrative Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().