Abstract
The present volume consists of four empirical research papers and two original research works. The study by Lalita Mohapatra and Suman Devarapalli investigated the association between board characteristics and integrated reporting quality. The analysis selected 46 Indian listed companies with 138 firm-year observations over three years. The study has found positive impact of board size, CEO duality, non-executive board members, financial leverage, COVID-19 crisis and firm size on IR quality. The study has found a negative effect of gender diversity, board activity and profitability on IR quality. The paper by Hesil George et al. aimed to study the relationship between green banking adoption practices and performance. The authors attempted a conceptual model to test the moderating effect of top management commitment in the relationship between green banking adoption practices and performance in a developing country context, India. They have surveyed and collected data from 393 employees working in banks in southern India. Himani Chahal’s research on ‘Family versus external blockholders’ ownership and firm performance: Empirical evidence from India’ touched on the impact of various categories of external block holders on the performance of Indian family firms due to their capacity to pressure management and monitor their actions. The study results show a U-shaped relation between family ownership and Indian family firms’ performance, as depicted by return on assets (ROA) and Tobin’s Q (TQ). The findings suggested that two prominent kinds of outside block holders that have been observed to be related to greater performance in family firms are government and foreign institutional shareholders.
Female directors play an important role in preventing corporate harm, daring to ask critical questions and controlling conflict among various stakeholders. The study by Giri Suseno et al. aimed to explore the effect of family control in stimulating leverage and firm value and assess the moderating role of female directors between family control on leverage and firm value in Indonesian Stock Exchange and found that the presence of female directors can harmonise and balance the interests of majority and minority shareholders.
Global sustainability challenges have triggered a sense of accountability in society, culminating in the growing incorporation of sustainability into corporate operations. This article aims to investigate the influence of environmental, social and governance (ESG) disclosure on a company’s cost of financing in emerging markets. The paper by Jyoti Dua and Anil Sharma examined the criticality of separate pillars of ESG in determining the companies’ capital costs using a panel dataset of 192 non-financial companies drawn from the equity indices from the BRICS countries and another paper by M. Chandra Shekar et al. studied the association between the social sustainability aspects of ESG initiatives and stock price synchronicity in 146 publicly listed companies in India from 2011 to 2021. Social sustainability is gauged using indicators, such as community engagement, adherence to human rights, customer loyalty, consumer health and safety protection, and employee welfare. The research confirms that the economic benefits of social sustainability bestow on companies and their investors.