Manuscript Type: EmpiricalResearch Question/Issue: South Africa (SA) has pursued distinctive corporate governance (CG) disclosure policy reforms in the form of the King Reports, which require firms to disclose a set of recommended good CG practices on both shareholders and stakeholders. This paper investigates the effect of the new shareholder and stakeholder CG disclosure rules on firm value, as well as the relative value relevance of disclosing good CG practices on shareholders versus stakeholders.Research Findings/Insights: Using a sample of 169 SA listed firms from 2002 to 2007, we find that disclosing good CG practices on both shareholders and stakeholders impacts positively on firm value, with the latter evidence providing new explicit support for the resource dependence theory. However, we provide additional new evidence, which suggests that disclosing shareholder CG practices contributes significantly more to firm value than stakeholder ones. Our results are robust to controlling for different types of endogeneities.Theoretical/Academic Implications: The paper generally contributes to the literature on the association between disclosure of CG practices and firm value by specifically modelling the relationship within a unique institutional and CG environment. Specifically, we make two new contributions to the extant literature. First, we show how stakeholder CG disclosure practices impact on firm value. Second, we provide evidence on the relative value relevance of disclosing shareholder and stakeholder CG practices.Practical/Policy Implications: Our results have important policy and regulatory implications, especially for authorities in other developing countries facing socio-economic problems that are currently contemplating or pursuing CG disclosure policy reforms. Since our evidence indicates that additional value can be created for firms that provide more transparent information on stakeholder CG practices, it provides authorities in other emerging countries currently planning or pursing CG reforms with a strong motivation to formally extend CG disclosure rules to cover both shareholder and stakeholder provisions.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate as to whether post‐Apartheid South African (SA) listed corporations voluntarily comply with and disclose recommended good corporate governance (CG) practices and, if so, the major factors that influence such voluntary CG disclosure behaviour.Design/methodology/approachThe paper constructs a broad voluntary CG disclosure index containing 50 CG provisions from the 2002 King Report using a sample of 169 SA listed corporations from 2002 to 2006. The authors also conduct regression analysis to identify the main drivers of voluntary CG disclosure.FindingsThe results suggest that while compliance with, and disclosure of, good CG practices varies substantially among the sampled companies, CG standards have generally improved over the five‐year period examined. The authors also find that block ownership is negatively associated with voluntary CG disclosure, while board size, audit firm size, cross‐listing, the presence of a CG committee, government ownership and institutional ownership are positively related to voluntary CG disclosure.Practical implicationsThese findings have important implications for policy‐makers and regulators. Evidence of improving CG standards implies that efforts by various stakeholders at improving CG standards in SA companies have had some positive impact on CG practices of SA firms. However, the substantial variation in the levels of compliance implies that enforcement may need to be strengthened further.Originality/valueThere is a dearth of evidence on the level of compliance with the King Report. This study fills this gap by providing evidence for the first time on the level of compliance achieved, as well as contributing generally to the literature on compliance with codes of good governance and voluntary disclosure.

This study investigates whether and to what extent publicly listed corporations voluntarily comply with and disclose recommended good corporate governance (CG) practices, and distinctively examines whether the observed cross-sectional differences in such CG disclosures can be explained by ownership and board mechanisms with specific focus on Saudi Arabia. The study's results suggest that corporations with larger boards, a Big 4 auditor, higher government ownership, a CG committee, and higher institutional ownership disclose considerably more than those that are not. By contrast, the study finds that an increase in block ownership significantly reduces CG disclosure. The study's results are generally robust to a number of econometric models that control for different types of disclosure indices, firm-specific characteristics, and firm-level fixed effects.

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1 Corporate governance, Islamic governance and earnings management in Oman: A new empirical insights from a behavioural theoretical framework Abstract Purpose: This paper examines the impact of corporate (CG) and Islamic (IG) governance mechanisms on corporate earnings management (EM) behaviour in Oman. Design/Methodology/Approch: We employ one of the largest and extensive datasets to-date on CG, IG and EM in any developing country, consisting of a sample of 116 unique Omani listed corporations from 2001 to 2011 (i.e.,1,152 firm-year observations) and a broad CG index containing 72 CG provisions. Wealso employ a number of robust econometric models that sufficiently account for alternative CG/EM proxies and potential endogeneities.Findings: First, we find that, on average, better-governed corporations tend to engage significantly less in EM than their poorly-governed counterparts. Second, our evidence suggests that corporations that depict greater commitment towards incorporating Islamic religious beliefs and values into their operations through the establishment of an IG committee tend to engage significantly less in EM than their counterparts without such a committee. Finally and by contrast, we do not find any evidence that board size, audit firm size, the presence of a CG committee and board gender diversity have any significant relationship with the extent of EM.Originality: To the best of our knowledge, this is a first empirical attempt at examining the extent to which CG and IG structures may drive EM practices that explicitly seeks to draw new insights from a behavioural theoretical framework (i.e., behavioural theory of corporate boards and governance).

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