The purpose is to explore whether the CEO’s personal and professional attributes affect corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure or not in particular context of Pakistan. This article attempts to bridge this gap using the data set of 1,790 firm-year observations comprising of firms listed at the Pakistan Stock Exchange. For this purpose, the logistic regression technique is employed while taking CEO personal and professional attributes as explanatory variables and CSR disclosure as the dependent variable. Results indicate that firm size and CSR disclosure has a positive relationship. The outcomes based on binary logistic regression demonstrate that CEO ownership has a negative impact, whereas CEO tenure, CEO education, CEO age, and CEO compensation are the variables that have a positive impact on CSR disclosure. In addition, duality, ownership, and gender of the CEO are found to be insignificant. Evidence on CEO demographics and their impact on disclosure choice might be helpful for policymakers and regulators. This study lacks generalization due to the unique setting of Pakistan. Our research contributes to the body of knowledge containing upper echelons theory in several ways. First, it answers the call for an extension of research toward social responsibility disclosures and individual’s traits impact on it. Second, our study adds to the scarce literature available on CSR research and practices in developing countries. Third, it is one of the first quantitative studies in the specific context of Pakistan as data for these variables is not available in organized form publicly.

The purpose of this study is to explore the link between corporate governance characteristics and corporate social responsibility disclosure of listed companies in the Pakistan stock Exchange (PSX), Pakistan. A sample of 179 companies from financial and non-financial sectors are studied from 2009 to 2015. The data is collected from their annual reports and websites. Binary logistic regression analysis is employed to test the models. The results reveal that board size, number of meetings and board independence are significant corporate governance characteristics to establish the link with corporate social responsibility disclosure. This study also explore that the trend of CSR disclosure is increasing in financial as well as non-financial sector. Additionally, the companies disclose their CSR activities lead in financial performance as compare to their counterpart. This study adds in the literature to explore the influence of board characteristics on corporate social responsibility disclosure from a developing country’s perspective.

This study addresses the questions of “How” and “When” CEO duality affects firm performance from a developing country’s perspective. To address the research question, CEO duality serves as an explanatory variable, board effectiveness as a mediator, CEO personal characteristics as moderator, firm-specific characteristics as control, and performance indicators as a dependent variable. Our dataset comprises 163 Pakistani firms listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange for 2009 to 2018. Results demonstrate that CEO’s duality negatively affects a firm’s financial performance; however, board effectiveness mediates the link between CEO duality and firm performance. The results support the agency theory framework. Furthermore, findings proposed that the CEO’s attributes (age, gender, and financial education) significantly moderate the link between a CEO’s duality and firm performance. The findings may be generalized among the developing countries and net 11 ( N-11) specifically. The current study claims to be the first one that explores the mediating role of the board effectiveness and moderating role of the CEO personal attributes together on a duality-performance link employing Pakistan’s corporate data. The findings suggest that policymakers and regulators ensure separation of power between Chairman and CEO to assure transparency through induction of more independence in the board room.

This research study compares the financially distressed and financially healthy companies, based on their audit committee attributes over the 2006–2010 period. While focusing on the manufacturing sector of Pakistan, the logit regression results reveal that audit committee composition and audit committee opinion have significant impact on the financial distress of the companies while audit committee size has insignificant impact on financial distress. The first of its kind, this study, benefits investors, financial analysts, accounting professionals, and practitioners. Their decision-making process will be enhanced regarding the evaluation of financially distressed companies and financially healthy ones. Despite its limitations, this study fills up the literature gap by focusing on the financially distressed firms that have not yet been bankrupted, thus giving them a chance to restructure their policies regarding the implementation of corporate governance practices in the context of Pakistan. This study has ignored financial sector of Pakistan because of different reporting styles of financial firms. The periods before and after the period of financial distress have also been ignored in the study.

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