Abstract

     We investigate the relationship between board diversity (relation-oriented diversity, task-oriented diversity, and overall board diversity) and financial statement comparability. We find that diverse boards are positively associated with financial statement comparability, suggesting that board diversity improves governance mechanisms by alleviating agency conflicts, leading to higher comparability than homogenous boards. We also find that institutional ownership positively affects the association between board diversity and financial statement comparability. Furthermore, the positive effect of diversity, institutional ownership, and comparability are more pronounced in non-state-owned firms and non-crisis periods. Our findings remain consistent with a battery of econometric techniques and measures of comparability. This study provides new insights regarding the role of boardroom diversity in shaping the qualitative aspect of financial reporting, i.e., financial statement comparability.

Introduction

     Corporate boards influence all the organizational outcomes because of the strategic nature of their decisions. The idea of diversity has gained attention over the last two decades after the extraordinary governance failures and increasing demand from investors and regulators for improved monitoring (Ararat et al., 2015). Since then, the opportunities and challenges presented by board diversity have long fascinated the researchers. Diversity has various facets, such as age, gender, technical expertise, and experience of running a business. Earlier studies suggest that diversity affects firms in many ways. For instance, board diversity has a significant effect on a firm’s stock price crash risk (Jebran et al., 2020), cash holding (Atif et al., 2019), asset prices (Li and Zeng, 2019), firm performance (Aggarwal et al., 2019; Carter et al., 2010), corporate investment (Harjoto et al., 2018), financial frauds (Xu et al., 2018), earnings management (Bilal et al., 2018; Hoang et al., 2017; Labelle et al., 2010; Park & Shin, 2004), corporate social responsibility (Harjoto et al., 2015) and corporate risk-taking (Serfling, 2014), etc. All these prior research have explored the effect of board diversity on various corporate dimensions, including earnings management and financial fraud (Bilal et al., 2018; Hoang et al., 2017; Labelle et al., 2010; Park & Shin, 2004; Xu et al., 2018). However, these studies ignored the qualitative facets of financial reporting, i.e., financial statement comparability (comparability hereafter). Using a comprehensive measure of diversity includes relation diversity which comprises demographic characteristics such as gender and age; task diversity which contains job-related attributes such as tenure, education, and expertise; and overall diversity to study the impact of diversity on comparability.

Conclusion

     The study investigates the effect of board diversity on financial statement comparability in China settings. We divide board diversity characteristics into three categories: relation-oriented diversity (i.e., gender and age), task-oriented diversity (i.e., experience, education, and tenure), and overall board diversity (sum of task and relation diversity). We find a positive relationship between board diversity and financial statements comparability. The magnitude is significant, both statistically and economically. These findings suggest that greater board diversity improves the monitoring of managerial resources, reduces agency conflict, and result in higher comparability. The findings also exhibit collective knowledge, increase cognitive abilities, improve board functionality, improve the monitoring of managerial activities and lead to higher comparability. We also document that institutional ownership positively affects the relationship between board diversity and comparability. The monitoring effect of institutional investors boosts the effect of board diversity on comparability. The results reveal that diversity reduces incentives for an opaque information environment, enhances monitoring of managerial activities, and increases transparency resulting in higher comparability.