Ayoib Che Ahmad

Political Connection, Board Characteristics and Environmental Disclosure in Nigeria

Companies continue to fold up after the global economic melt-down of 2008 starting with the Enron saga.One of the reasons offered by practitioners and intellectuals in their search for the cause and solution to the problem is information asymmetry between the managements and the shareholders.It is extremely necessary ever since the sagas and continuous business failures and financial distress in Nigeria, in particular, to focus on monitoring mechanisms (MM), especially in nSub-Saharan countries.In addition, it is essential to understand the factors relating to MM as it cannot work in isolation.The purpose of this study is therefore to examine the extent to which block-holders impact on MM using the annual reports of 111 Nigerian non-financial listed companies in the context of agency theory.In addition, data were collected from the companies in respect of their internal auditing using the questionnaire as these are not available in the annual reports.The findings provide evidence that the block-holders significantly relate to monitoring mechanisms. Thus, this paper provides a new knowledge regarding monitoring mechanisms and its antecedents (directorship, internal and external auditing).These findings are with policy implications for the board of directors to implement their monitoring responsibilities.The findings also suggest policy implications for the internal and external auditors.The findings are nuseful for further review of corporate governance guidelines by the regulatory agencies and government.The paper contributes to knowledge in Sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria in particular by examining block-holders in relation to the naggregate cost of monitoring mechanisms (directorship, internal and external auditing).

The impact of soft regulations on boardroom diversity and shareholders' confidence in Malaysia

Soft regulations, commonly known as Corporate Governance (CG) codes, aim to enhance shareholders confidence by regulating corporate world. These regulations have turned much of the attention towards the improvement of boardroom diversity particularly after economic turmoil 2007-08. Malaysia like other countries, also recommended improving boardroom diversity in its recently introduced third CG code (Malaysian Code on Corporate Governance) in 2012. Thus, this paper proposes to investigate boardroom diversity (age, gender & ethnicity) and its relation with shareholders confidence measured by share market price in the non-financial listed companies of Malaysia from 2010 to 2013. The proposed period of analysis represents two years pre and two years post enactment period of the code which will highlight the impact of the code, if any. The proposed study will fill the literature gap as most of the previous literature in the area has investigated the relationship between boardroom diversity and firm performance rather than shareholders confidence.