Effects of Duality, Board Size and Board Composition on Corporate Governance Disclosure in Pakistan

Disclosure plays an important role in corporate governance. It permits the investors and shareholders to make better decisions. Corporate governance has not been the focus of previous studies on disclosure. This study examines the effects of smaller and larger board size, executive and non-executive board members and CEO duality on the extent of disclosure practices in Pakistan. The checklist containing 29 items adopted from previous researches in the same field is used to measure the level of disclosure. The items in the checklist are mainly divided into four categories of financial transparency, ownership structure, management structure and CSR. This checklist was then applied to 53 listed companies of different sectors in Karachi Stock exchange by the manual review of the annual reports of 5 years from 2007 to 2011 downloaded from each company’s website. The results of the study highlighted that the level of corporate governance disclosure is good in Pakistan. The findings showed that larger board size positively affects the level of corporate governance disclosure whereas CEO duality and board composition doesn’t have significant impact on level of disclosure.