Board diversity and corporate voluntary disclosure (CVD) in the annual reports of Bangladesh

This is an exploratory study designed to investigate the extant and nature of corporate voluntary disclosure (CVD) in corporate annual reports of Bangladesh. Specifically, examine the relationship between board diversity and corporate voluntary disclosures. The paper is based on a sample of 106 listed non-financial companies in Dhaka Stock Exchanges (DSE) from the period 2007-2011 and all the companies are selected by Judgment Sampling. The study is used ordinary least squares regression model to examine the relationship between explanatory variables and voluntary disclosure. Using an unweighted relative disclosure index for measuring voluntary disclosure, the empirical results indicate that Percentage Female Director (PFD), Board Leadership Structure (BLS) and Total Assets (TA) are positively association with corporate voluntary disclosure (CVD). In contrast, the extent of corporate voluntary disclosure is negatively associated with a Percentage of equity owned by the insiders to all equity of the firm higher management ownership.