Many Indian firms are proactively adopting and disclosing newer human resources (HR) practices to attract and retain best HR for the success of their business operations. The research questions of this study are: (a) Have human resources practices disclosures (HRPD) of Indian listed firms evolved over time? (b) What newer HR practices are being adopted and disclosed by Indian listed firms? (c) What are firm-level drivers of HRPD of Indian listed firms? Initially, through content analysis of HRPD of 160 listed non-financial Indian firms, this study developed a 35-itemed comprehensive HRPD index (HRPDI). It was found that Indian firms’ HRPD have indeed evolved over time. Further, the regression analysis results depicted that firms that are larger, older, have effective audit committees and the big four as external auditors tend to have higher levels of HRPD. The regression analysis also revealed a surprising result that Indian firms with higher external financing needs tend to have lower level of HRPD. The authors explained the above surprising result in terms of inherent conflict of interests between the firm’s finance department and the HR department. While the firm’s HR department views expenses incurred to adopt and disclose HR practices as the necessary investment to attract and retain best HR for the organization, the finance department views such expenses as discretionary costs, which must be curtailed when needed. Therefore, firms in need of external financing would try to minimize their expenses by curtailing on adoption and disclosure of HR practices.

Author investigates whether firms with institutional ownership limit classification shifting. Classification shifting is new technique of earnings management wherein managers misclassify line items of income statement to present favorable operating performance. Core earnings expectation model (McVay in Account Rev 81:501–531, 2006) is adopted for measuring expense shifting. Regression model is employed to analyze whether ownership structure affects expense classification shifting in Indian Firms. It is found that firms with institutional ownership are engaged in expense misclassification to inflate core earnings of the firms. Investors should be more observant for the ownership structure of the firm. Regulators and Accounting Professional Bodies should provide for more mandatory disclosure in order to eliminate such misclassification practices. Auditors should also look in detail in financial statements for detecting CS activity, which is less likely to be detected as it does not impact bottom-line earnings of the firm. The paper provides the literature on expenses misclassification and presents the evidence that firms with institutional ownership are engaged in classification shifting.

Abusive transactions with related parties are more common in a concentrated ownership structure. Previous studies have debated that the fallout of concentrated corporate ownership (i.e. sizable corporate conglomerates and corporate enterprises owned by business families or the government of the state) is high in a relatively close market. Despite the adoption of the Anglo–US model in BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) for improving transparency, accountability, and fairness, the rate of corporate failure involving abusive related party transactions has been high. This study examines differences in related party transactions (RPT) regulatory strategies among BRICS with respect to international standards (Anglo–US model) and local conditions. The study analyses to what extent BRICS nations have adopted the Anglo–US model by comparing the RPT regulatory framework with the convergence towards the Anglo–US model, divergence from the Anglo–US model, and unfolding of a new construct in BRICS. Overall, the study finds Brazilian and Russian RPT legislation the least convergent towards the Anglo–US model and RPT legislation in India, China, and South Africa fully convergent towards the Anglo–US model. BRICS have shown persistence or resistance towards the Anglo–US RPT legal transplantation. In certain aspects, BRICS have made a concerted effort to regulate abusive RPTs suitable to their local conditions. However, RPT legislation in BRICS nations has failed to address some major governance problems caused by concentrated ownership structures (monitoring of RPTs in pyramidal companies, same RPT thresholds for group and non-group companies, dominance of controlling shareholders on independent directors’ appraisal of RPTs, and the lack of adequate disclosure requirements for RPTs).

The objective of the study is to apprehend and explore the emerging themes in the existing literature about the ‘Corporate Social Responsibility disclosures (CSR)’ and ‘Earnings Management (EM)’ relationship. It employs a combination of bibliographic techniques such as author, country, keyword, cluster, citation analysis and bibliographic coupling on the data captured from Scopus and Web of Science indexed journals. CSR and EM are niche research field since 2014, where the non-western researchers are dominating. The major keywords are corporate governance, discretionary accruals, CSR and real earnings management. Most of the studies are non-collaborative in nature. The study identified three major clusters which focus on three different aspects of the relationship between CSR and EM. These aspects are: reducing information asymmetry, meeting stakeholders’ expectations and role of corporate governance and other institutional factors. The study visualizes the past, present, and future of research for CSR disclosures and EM by re-examining, unfolding and summarizing the overall knowledge, knowledge gaps, progress and mapping of the themes emerging from past studies. Therefore, the study provides a one-stop overview on the topic to interested researchers and other stakeholders such as regulators and corporate practitioners.

This paper examines whether gender diversity (GD) on corporate boards influences financial performance (FP) of Indian firms using System Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) methods by considering panel data of 364 firms during 2017 to 2021, comprising of 1820 firm-year observations. The study reveals that the mere presence of a woman director (WD) on boards makes no difference in financial performance. Presence of WDs as a significant portion of the boards and their active roles in the functioning and governance of companies positively contribute to firms’ financial performances and economic value creation. Regarding other governance parameters, the study shows that larger boards do not necessarily improve firm performance. Also, independent directors do not necessarily add value to corporate performance and value creation. While a higher promoter's stake is an important factor for Indian companies to drive corporate performance, firms with separate CEO and chairperson outperform firms with CEO duality. The study also reveals that the covid 19 pandemic has negatively influenced the financial performance and economic profit generation of the Indian firms. This study is important for several reasons. First, this study considers the period (2017–2021) when Indian companies adopted new financial reporting practices (IND-AS) in line with International Financial Reporting System (IFRS), the mandatory quota system of women directors’ appointment is implemented and new corporate governance norms are implemented. Hence, our study contributes to the literature by proving meaningful insights on the role of gender diversity and other corporate governance parameters on financial performance of Indian firms in the light of newly adopted accounting and financial reporting practices. Second, few previous India based studies have mostly used pooled OLS or fixed effect models, and did not address the endogeneity problem in different forms like Dynamic Endogeneity, Simultaneity, and Unobserved Heterogeneity. This paper addresses the endogeneity problem appropriately by using the system generalized method of moments (GMM) while modelling the relation between WDs and firms’ FP. Therefore, the findings of this study are more reliable and unbiased and can be useful for effective policy making on gender diversity and corporate governance issues. Third, few prior studies which have looked into the role of WDs on FP of Indian firms, have mostly used return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE) and Tobin’s Q as performance parameters. Here, in addition to ROA, ROE and Tobin’s Q, we also use economic value added (EVA) as indicators of corporate performance to understand the role of WDs on economic value creation for companies. The EVA is considered as modern technique to measure the economic profit earned by a firm, and it has gained huge popularity among companies as an improved technique for measuring financial performance for companies. To the best of our knowledge, the role of WDs on economic value creation by firms has not been investigated before particularly in the Indian context. This is another unique contribution of this study. Fourth, the Covid 19 pandemic had impacted global economy severely and India was no exception. Financial performances of most Indian firms were negatively impacted due to the nationwide lockdown and uncertainties about production, revenue and earnings. This study considers both the pre and post Covid 19 pandemic period in examining our central research question using a year dummy. Therefore, our study also captures whether the covid 19 pandemic has actually impacted the financial performance of Indian firms, while modelling this relation. This is another valuable and unique contribution of this study to the literature. The findings of this study provide an understanding of how board gender diversity and other governance parameters influence financial performance of Indian firms in an emerging market context. The outcomes are also explained and aligned with the relevant policy implications in the light of recent Indian corporate governance norms and policies. These findings are useful to the companies and policymakers, as they can use these findings while designing effective boards, which can be useful in improving firm performance. Board of directors, investors, regulators, and policymakers can effectively use these findings to understand how gender diverse boards and other corporate governance parameters influence firms’ financial performance under the concentrated ownership pattern.

This paper conducts a bibliometric analysis and a review of existing literature focusing on past 20 years (2000–2019) of research on corporate risk disclosures. The bibliometric data are gathered from two of the most widely referred repositories: Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. The paper analysed various performance parameters such as research growth, most productive and highly cited authors, top source journal, affiliation analysis (institution-wise and country-wise), annual publication output, country affiliation analysis, document-based citation analysis, cited author-based co-citation Analysis and Top 30 highly influential papers from both databases WoS and Scopus. Apart from this, based on bibliometric analysis, authors’ country of origin, document-based citation analysis and cited authors-based co-citation analysis are visualized using VOSviewer software. This paper also listed thirty highly cited titles from both the databases.

This research foremost intention is to investigate the corporate governance structure effect on the firm’s performance of the Indian-listed companies. The study was based on a six-year financial figure from FY 2014–2015 to FY 2019–2020 of Indian-listed companies on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). The study applied the panel data statics model such as pooled OLS, fixed effect and random effect model, Hausman test and the Sys-GMM models for testing the study hypotheses. The study findings indicate that higher board size has a positive significant impact with the ROA, Tobin’s Q on the firm’s performance, and this helps in strengthen the decision-making process. Besides, the study results show statistically insignificant correlation among the ROA, EPS and NPM with the board independence. The results also reflected the positively correlation among the board meetings and the performance indicators of Tobin’s Q, and these scenarios lead to that enhancement of corporate governance practices. Besides, the results negatively revealed correlation amongst the ROE, NPM and corporate governance indicators of CEO duality. The results of the study suggested that companies likely implement proper corporate governance practices leading to sophisticated effectiveness in firm’s performance and minimize agency cost. The study attempted corporate governance issues with the several different measures and firm’s variables other than using a single-measure context. Additionally, various model descriptions and statistical techniques are applied for analyzing the corporate governance structure and firm-related performance.

The paper aims to empirically investigate the influence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on firm performance in Indian listed firms. We use regression analysis to determine the relationship between CSR and firm performance. Both accounting and market measures of firm performance have been deployed for the purpose of the study. We have found mixed evidence. While CSR has a positive impact on the accounting measure, it has a weak relationship with market-based returns. Our most significant finding in the study is that markets do not perceive the standard mandated CSR spends worthy of a reward. Instead, such spends are considered hygiene whereas expenditure made by firms in excess of the mandated CSR spends is rewarded by markets for their CSR conscious behaviour. We therefore advise the Indian companies to spend beyond the mandated CSR outlays if they are to improve on their market value.

The present paper investigates the relationship between earnings management and board characteristics of independence and gender diversity in the Indian corporate sector in accordance with the sectorial classification. The main corporate ownership model in Indian firms is found to be the promoter-dominated shareholders model which further illustrates the importance of the board in restraining earnings management. In Indian companies, the main issue is to control the dominant shareholder and safeguard the minority shareholders. The study uses a panel data structure to examine the importance of sector segregation and gender diversity in the context of earnings management practices among large public companies in India. The study shows that the magnitude of earnings management highly varies with the relative nature of the sector. Furthermore, the results suggest that woman directors are more efficient at monitoring earnings management in respective firms and mere having independent directors does not ensure sound corporate governance. This ensures that sectorial classification and gender diversity are important factors in the corporate practices of earnings management. The results are of considerable importance to policymakers in evaluating the sector characteristics about earnings management, and improving corporate governance policy-making by increasing the women directors’ participation and implementing the related board variables in the relative sector. This is the first study that explores the association between gender diversity of the board and earnings management practices of large listed companies in an emerging economy like India. It also evaluates the significance of sectorial classification in this context for added significance of the study.

This paper studies the impact of board composition and ownership structure on accounting as well as market performance of Indian firms in presence of certain unique statutory provisions relating to independent directors and limits on ownership concentration. The study uses a sample of 265 non-finance, non-banking and non-PSU Indian companies of S&P 500 index and applies OLS models initially. Having identified evidence of a possible feedback loop, the study then employs instrumental variables and 2 SLS models to explore how firm performance is impacted by ownership concentration and board composition after controlling for firm-level and industry-level characteristics. A series of robustness tests are used to substantiate the findings from the main analysis. A two-way relationship and ‘nonlinearity’ are recorded between market performance and ownership concentration. The study shows that a moderate-to-high ownership concentration between 25 and 75%enhances firm performance and very low level of concentration adversely impacts the same. Performance is positively impacted by board size but not by board independence. The findings of the study become particularly important for legislators and investors in the backdrop of SEBI’s regulations fixing a maximum limit on promoter’s shareholding and existence of a minimum external directors in the board for listed Indian companies that might have an implication on firm performance from liquidity, agency and information asymmetry perspective. The study documents that an optimal shareholding concentration and large board size with internal directors rather than a high percentage of independent external directors leads to value creation in Indian context. The paper provides new insights onto the relationship between board composition, ownership structure and firm performance in the backdrop of regulations brought out by SEBI in this behalf. The findings of the study have varying degree of application in common law origin countries with strong regulatory framework for investors’ protection.

This paper empirically examines the linkage between ownership pattern, board composition and earnings management of Indian firms using the system Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) by considering panel data 364 non-financial firms from 2017 to 2019, comprising of 1092 firm-year observations. The study also uses Pooled OLS and Fixed Effects model to compare the results with the system GMM in examining board composition–earnings management relation. The study reveals that board independence and diligence of independent directors do not play any role in curbing earnings management. Also, busy independent directors and persons with multiple directorships are not necessarily useful in arresting earnings management. However, earnings management practice is more prevalent in firms where the same person enjoys the power of a CEO as well as chairman. An increase in promoters' shareholding also leads to an increase in earnings management. While earnings management is not influenced by FII shareholding, it increases with the increase in DII shareholding. This study is important for several reasons. First, since this study considers the period after the implementation of a new financial reporting system in India (popularly known as IND-AS), the findings of this study reflect the earnings management behavior of Indian firms in light of new financial reporting practices. Second, the study considers the period when significant governance initiatives are taken after the implementation of the New Companies Act, 2013. This study contributes to the literature by addressing the recent governance norms and aligning the relevant policy implications accordingly. The findings of this study reveal a clear understanding as to which board level and governance parameters are useful in constraining earnings management and disclosing quality earnings by companies in an emerging market context. The outcomes are also explained further for relevant policy implications. Board of directors, managers, investors, regulators, and policymakers can find these outcomes useful for making critical governance-related decisions. Finally, the study contributes to the existing literature by providing evidence on what board level and governance parameters are useful in constraining firms' earnings management in an emerging economy under the regime of new financial reporting practices.

This study tries to examine the empirical relationship between corporate governance and financial performance of Indian firms by developing a corporate governance index (CGI) based on a variety of corporate governance characteristics. Such characteristics include board structure, ownership structure, director participation and busyness, market for external control, and product market competition. We employ a panel dataset for Indian non-financial firms listed on the National Stock Exchange for the period 2010–2018. Using a System GMM dynamic panel approach, we analyse the relationship of CGI with different firm performance measures including market-based performance measures like Tobin’s Q (TQ), and accounting-based performance measures like Return on Assets (ROA) and Return on Net Worth (RONW). Based on the empirical results, we find a significant positive relationship of corporate governance index (CGI) with ROA and RONW and significant negative relationship with TQ. Lastly, the CGI used by our study is based on a broad spectrum of dimensions of corporate governance and serves as a direction for business houses and shareholders to work towards governance practices leading to better financial performance of the firms.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between financial performances and the extent of environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) disclosure of Indian companies. The content analysis was used to analyse the ESG performance of the sample companies from their annual and sustainability reports. For this purpose, ESG disclosure index is constructed with the help of GRI framework, Clause 49 of listing agreement and relevant literature. Ordinary Least Square (OLS) method was used to examine the relationship between the ESG disclosure index and the independent variables, namely the financial performance, market performance, FIIs stake and leverage after statistically controlling the effects of a firm’s size and the industry type of the companies; results based on the formulated model indicated that financial and market performance have a positive and significant association with the level of ESG disclosure, whereas FIIs stake and leverage have a negative and significant association with the level of ESG disclosure. The findings are limited to the context of the study, and it was limited to Indian companies listed at Bombay Stock Exchange for the period 2013–2016. The sources of data in this study were companies’ annual and sustainability reports. The study may be constructive for organizations and statutory bodies to take into consideration in identification of corporate attributes that will enhance ESG disclosure, since it had been shown in literature that the voluntary corporate social responsibility and corporate governance reporting in India is generally low. In recent times, there has been an increase in ESG reporting, to address the increasing concerns of the stakeholders. Thus, this study will emphasize the level of activities through ESG reporting in Indian companies and help the government to ascertain the level of ESG activities through corporate social responsibility reporting among Indian companies. The study reveals the extent of the disclosure of ESG to companies annual and sustainability reports and constructed the CSR index based on GRI framework and Clause 49 of listing agreement.

The study examines the impact of corporate governance on CSR disclosure practices of Indian companies. The corporate governance variables such as board age, audit committee size, board meetings, CEO duality, board independence, employee CSR training, independent directors board meetings, sustainability committee and women on board were used. The sample consists of 386 companies listed in the BSE 500 index for a period of 10 years from 2007–2016 and panel data regression is used for analysis. The study finds that the corporate governance variables such as board independence, CEO duality and sustainability committee improve CSR disclosure. In contrast, board age, employee CSR training and women on board weakens CSR disclosure. This study is important due to following reasons, firstly, Indian policymakers issued a wide set of voluntary and non-voluntary rules and guidelines on corporate governance and CSR disclosure. It is interesting to see its impact on Indian companies. Secondly, this study uses a more advanced Bloomberg ESG scores as well as individual environment, social and governance scores to measure the CSR disclosure. Finally, the study aims to fill the literature gap concerning corporate governance and CSR disclosure in India covering a larger study period and sample size.

This study examines the corporate governance characteristics and its influence on the intellectual capital (IC) performance for a sample of 95 firms listed on National Stock Exchange in India. The corporate governance (CG) characteristics are represented through board size, independence of directors, frequency of board meetings, remuneration of directors and composition of board. The impact of these CG characteristics on the performance of intellectual capital and its components is studied for a 7-year period, i.e. FY2010–2011 to FY2016–2017, using panel regression. The research findings provide clear evidence that CG characteristics influence the IC performance of only large-cap firms in India. Further, board size and independence of directors are seen to have the most significant impacts. Board size is negatively associated with IC performance of large-cap firms. Capital expended efficiency and productivity of midcap firms are observed to have a significant inverted-U relation with board size. The relative significance of various other CG factors varies for IC as well as its sub-components. The findings of this study are important because it gives a strong empirical evidence for regulatory authorities in India to strictly monitor the compliance of rules on structure and composition of the board of directors besides just laying down broad guidelines for the listed companies. This also serves as the first research work to justify the significance of corporate governance on IC performance of firms in India. One of the limitations of this research is inability to incorporate several other characteristics of board such as duality and detailed profile of board members due to non-availability of time-series data for all the firms.

In this article, we examine two critical aspects of the Indian corporate governance system, that is, influence of group affiliation and diversification on firm performance and impact of block holders on firm value. Using 1833 publicly listed firms for the year 2001–2004, we document that the benefits associated with business group affiliation is no longer observed in the post-economic reform era. Instead we find that standalone firms outperform the group affiliated firms when we control for firm-specific characteristics. Group formation has lost its internal capital market advantage over standalone firms due to the expansion of Indian capital market. Similarly, group diversification strategy is seen to be sub-optimal and diversification appears to be value-destroying. Among the major block holders, domestic financial institutions are found to be playing an insignificant role in comparison to the domestic and foreign institutional investors.

Effective corporate governance helps build vibrant and efficient capital markets. There was a remarkable transformation in the disclosure practices of Indian companies since the legislation of corporate governance norms through Clause 49 of the Listing Agreement in the year 2000. This in turn improved both the quantity and quality of information available for an investor in the capital market. Ideally, this should result in ‘informationally-efficient’ stock markets. This article investigates the consequences of governance regulations and the impact of information diffusion on Indian capital market efficiency using GARCH (1, 1). The corporate governance legislation through Clause 49 had a significant impact on the Indian stock market volatility. There has been substantial reduction in market volatility in the post-governance act period. However, there was no evidence substantiating that additional news improved the informational efficiency of the markets. In fact, the additional information resulted in greater volatility persistence.

The forces of globalisation prompt more and more countries to open their doors to foreign investment and as businesses expand across borders, the need arises to recognise the benefits of having commonly accepted and understood financial reporting standards. In this scenario of globalisation, India cannot insulate itself from the developments taking place worldwide.

The economic crises of 1991 forced India to reassess its protectionist, closed economy system. Globalisation was the imminent choice. The opening up and integration of the Indian economy with the rest of the world brought a dramatic change in its business environment and governance standards. The Indian stock markets matured and we have witnessed a tremendous interest among international investors in entering this emerging market. This paper traces the history of corporate governance in India and discusses key unresolved issues against the backdrop of sweeping reforms in the stock market structure, systems and regulation.

This study analyses the impact of corporate governance (CG) mechanisms on valuations of selected companies in Fast Moving Consumer Goods and Information Technology sectors in India. The study is carried out for the period 2002–2006 because improvement initiatives of CG were undertaken during the period. The panel data regression method is used to examine the impact of CG factors on market valuation. Data consisting of a sample of 30 companies for the entire five-year period represent the database for this study. Results obtained showed an overall strong significant relationship between CG and market value of a firm. Of all the CG mechanisms (representing CG) studied, however, only shareholders' rights, and value creation for stakeholders, emerged as important for impact on the valuation. The findings are expected to have practical implications for directors, owners and regulators to formulate the CG codes and guidelines.

The paper makes a case for corporate governance as an internal mechanism in banks, and therefore influenced by cultural issues, to dovetail with the overriding compulsions of prudential regulation, that sets the boundaries for systemic stability. The dynamic changes in the structure of global financial markets and the blurring of boundaries between different players — banks, investment banks and hedge funds, pose new challenges for financial regulators. This is especially crucial in the context of structural mechanisms that are in place to run the new financial conglomerates. From a regulatory perspective, the key issue would be the presence of unregulated entities/holding companies in the structure. The presence of any unregulated entity within the Bank Holding Company/Financial Holding Company structure, especially an unregulated intermediate holding company, may prove to be a weak link in the entire structure, providing scope for regulatory arbitrage. As is evident from the recent sub-prime problems originating in the United States, all financial entities are interdependent and the collapse of any one, not necessarily a commercial bank, involves a systemic risk and may propel the financial regulator to save it. In the context of overriding compulsions of financial stability and the inherent limitations of any external regulation to anticipate all innovative, exotic derivative products and eliminate the propensity of excessive risk-taking by a bank/financial entity, regulators worldwide, and in India, are placing more and more responsibility on bank boards. This has entailed, on the part of the board, a better quantitative understanding of the risks inherent in specific lines of activity and a clear assessment of possible impact on the financials. In the Indian context, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has put in place detailed regulations related to the composition of bank boards, the ‘fit and proper’ criteria for appointment of directors, transparency and disclosure norms for derivative products, related-party transactions, risk-based internal audit and other crucial components of banks' corporate governance architecture. The systemic risk posed by such financial conglomerates (FC), because of possible regulatory arbitrage, is sought to be plugged by a system for all the identified FC whereby a designated entity within the conglomerate reports to its lead regulator. In order to monitor the intra-group transactions and exposures, information from the designated entities of each FC is obtained by the principal regulators and a system for exchange of information among the regulators has been put in place. Mixed ownership of government (as a majority shareholder) and private (almost all public sector banks are listed on the stock exchange) also poses a unique challenge of divergent objectives of shareholding and the issues of reconciling them. In the final analysis, corporate governance is a continuous process of evolving best practices in response to market developments. RBI cannot be complacent. This is the constant thrust of RBI's initiatives in ensuring a vibrant corporate governance framework.