Disclosure of Corporate Voluntary Board Governance Practices in India

Abstract

The present paper deals with the current as well as hotly debated issue of increasing attention on the extent of governance practices followed by the corporates. In particular, it investigates the disclosure of sound board practices followed by the top listed companies in India by relying upon a Voluntary Board Governance Disclosure Index (VBGDI) developed in the study. The index has been constructed by following the requirements stated under Revised Clause 49 of the Listing Agreement (2004) and Corporate Governance Voluntary Guidelines (2009). In addition, the study has covered two time points in its dataset in order to examine an improvement in the disclosure of board governance practices by the corporates from the time point 1 (2005-06) to the time point 2 (2009-10). The testing has been performed by means of paired samples t-test and Wilcoxen signed rank test (for robustness testing) which has reported significant improvement for some selected board practices in particular and for overall disclosure score as a whole. Overall, the analysis suggests that the corporate voluntary disclosure of the board governance practices has been improved (but only for some items), however, there are certain influential practices which should be covered by the companies in the ambit of their governance frameworks so that the level of governance standards in India can be upraised. On the whole, it suggests the companies to incorporate more board governance practices in the spectrum of their governance disclosures.

Keywords: Corporate Governance, Board Practices, Voluntary Guidelines, Disclosure Index, Time Points

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