Impact of corporate specific board attributes on capital disclosure quality evidence from India

The capitals disclosure has significant impact on improving the firm’s competitive advantage. This helps in value creation and improves the firm’s performance in short, medium, and long-term prospects. The multiple capital concept includes more social and sustainable information that enhance quality of firm. The current accounting standards do not strictly instruct the firms to disclose more about the multiple capitals. The initial studies have concentrated more on the adoption of integrated reporting (IR), IR quality and intellectual capital disclosure with board and firm features, but no study is carried out using capitals disclosure quality of IR framework and board specific features with the support of agency theory in Indian context. To this extension, this study has designed capital disclosure quality. The analysis is based on a sample of 46 Indian listed firms with 138 firm year observations during 2019 to 21 by employing balanced panel data analysis with Fixed Effect, Random Effect and Pooled Ordinary Least Square. The results disclose the favourable effect of board size, CEO duality, board independence, firm size, covid-19 on the Capital disclosure quality. In contrast, board activity, gender diversity, profitability, and leverage have negative association with capital disclosure quality. The study provides key insights for various stakeholder groups i.e., researchers, practitioners, accounting bodies, government agencies, investors, and policy makers. The present research adds to the literature by considering multiple capitals disclosure quality of IR which was scantly used an indicator for the IR quality. The study further includes the Indian companies where the adoption of IR framework is its initial stages and not mandatory, therefore by linking the disclosure quality and board characteristics in the Indian context will help the policy makers and the practitioners in formulating suitable future policies for the adoption of the novel IR framework. The insights are practising disclose of multiple capitals in annual reports under the IR framework can lead to know how value is created, how capitals links to achievement of sustainable developmental goals and suitable tool to communicate non-financial information.