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Board Diversity and ESG Disclosure: Evidence from China

Published: 28 December 2023 Publication History

Abstract

There is a close relationship between board diversity and ESG disclosure quality, as diversified boards are often able to enhance a company's ESG disclosure quality. This paper examines the effect of board diversity on ESG disclosure in Chinese listed firms from 2011 to 2020. Through the method of multiple regression, this paper finds that board diversity has a positive effect on ESG disclosure, which is more significant in state-owned enterprises with lower competition markets, lower marketization, and higher cash holdings by cross-sectional test. Through path analysis, this paper proves that the impact of board diversity on ESG disclosure is mainly achieved through improving the quality of internal control, reducing the level of digital transformation and the results are still valid after the endogeneity and robustness tests. With further analysis, this paper proposes that education, major, and gender of the board member have a significant influence on ESG disclosure. This paper enriches the background research on board diversity and expands the research on ESG.

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    ICIBE '23: Proceedings of the 2023 9th International Conference on Industrial and Business Engineering
    September 2023
    564 pages
    ISBN:9798400708824
    DOI:10.1145/3629378
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Publication History

    Published: 28 December 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. Board Diversity
    2. Corporation Governance
    3. Digital Transformation
    4. ESG Disclosure

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