The Simultaneous Disclosure of Shareholder and Stakeholder Corporate Governance Practices and their Antecedents

In making corporate governance (CG) related disclosure, firms may solely focus on shareholders or may broaden their scope of disclosure to serve other stakeholders as well. This study examines whether there are differences in the disclosure of shareholder and stakeholder corporate governance (CG) practices. Based on a hand-collected dataset of 1110 firm-years in South Africa (SA), and a disclosure index using 72 CG provisions from the King III report of CG, we find that the disclosure of stakeholder CG practices is relatively higher than that of shareholder CG practices. Our evidence suggests that foreign ownership, institutional ownership, racial diversity, and gender diversity increase total voluntary disclosure. In contrast, CEO age decreases total voluntary disclosure. Also, whilst foreign ownership, institutional ownership, gender diversity and racial diversity increase both shareholder and stakeholder CG disclosures, CEO age has a negative relationship with both shareholder and stakeholder CG disclosures. Further, board size reduces shareholder disclosure but not stakeholder disclosure. Our results further indicate that, ceteris paribus, the extent of shareholder CG disclosure relative to stakeholder CG disclosure is (1) lower with board size, gender diversity and racial diversity and (2) higher with the level of institutional ownership. Our findings are robust across a raft of econometric techniques.