Board structure and voluntary disclosure of listed industrial goods companies in nigeria

Thesis Overview

<p> </p><p><strong>1.0 INTRODUCTION</strong></p><p>Voluntary disclosure has received considerable attention by academic institutions and different countries around the world due to reported bankruptcies and business failures that affected gigantic companies the world over such. The list is an unending one, the following are but some few examples; Enron, Lehman Brothers Ltd, AIG Insurance Ltd, Xerox, Arthur Anderson, WorldCom, Tyco International, Adelphia Communications, Global Crossing, Parmalat, Nortel and Crocus. As a result, several corporate governance committees and organizations around the globe have produced a number of reports and establish rules help in monitoring and controlling management systems. These reports include the Cadbury Report (1992), and Green bury Report (1995), in the UK; the Business Roundtable (1997) in the US; the King Committee Report (1994), in South Africa and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Principles (1999, 2004). The committees established baselines for legislation on corporate governance that give birth, subsequently, to the enactment in the USA, Australia and elsewhere (O’Callaghan 2003). In general, the efforts made in the UK, the USA and the OECD addressed the notion that decisions made by the directors and executives of a public company should be consistent with the interests of investors, and hence adequate and accurate information concerning the operations and the value of the firm needs to be disclosed in a timely and reliable manner.</p><p>An effective board of directors is at the heart of the governance structure of a well-functioning and well-governed corporation, acting as the ultimate internal monitor. Ideally, the board guides long-term corporate strategy, puts the key agents in place to implement it, and monitors performance against the strategy set out. Consequently, bad company performance and governance begins with a board not fulfilling its key responsibilities. No study was conducted to assess the impact of board structure on voluntary disclosure of listed industrial goods companies in Nigeria. Hence, this study attempts to find out whether the board structure; CEO duality, foreign member on the board, board size and board composition have significant impact on voluntary disclosure of information in the Nigerian listed industrial goods companies. The study findings will be of important to information users including directors, investors, researchers, financial analysts, and government because they provide them with information that is useful when making investment and regulatory decisions. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: section 2 presents a literature review on the board structure and voluntary disclosure. Section 3 is the Research methodology. Section 4 presents research results and discussion, and finally conclusions and recommendations are presented in section 5.</p> <br><p></p>