Project Details
Description
The spread of corruption all over the globe has stimulated demands and initiatives to fortify corporate governance and implement anti-corruption programs. This study uses a quantitative approach to empirically investigate the effect of family ownership and involvement on anticorruption efforts by UK FTSE350 firms. Family firms represent about two thirds of all businesses around the world and generate about 70 percent of annual global GDP. Moreover, they are a ubiquitous organizational type in the U.K., where 87% of U.K. businesses are family businesses. Family firms have unique ownership structure and internal control mechanisms, which may have important inferences for their disclosure practices. The sample is composed of FTSE 350 companies, which are listed on the London Stock of Exchange for the period 2005-2013. Firms in insurance, utilities, and financial sectors will be excluded from the sample since these sectors have distinct regulatory settings relative to their counterparts. The sample period starts from year 2005 when the UK adopted the IFRS in order to obtain a homogenous sample and separate the effect of family control on anti-corruption disclosures. This study will be the first of its kind to investigate the effect of family control on corporate anticorruption disclosures. As such it makes several contributions to the literature. First, it expands the literature on corporate anti-corruption disclosures. Despite the mounting pressure of regulatory bodies and societies to improve transparency about anti-corruption and the global call for studies on the topic of anti-corruption, research on anti-corruption disclosure remains relatively limited. Second, this study contributes to the family firms literature through examining whether family firms differ from their non-family counterparts in terms of anti-corruption disclosures. It attempts to answer the call of Vazquez (2016) to examine the corporate ethical conduct of family firms, by investigating whether family firms make more anti-corruption disclosures relative to non-family firms. As such, the proposed research is expected to explain the wide variation of anticorruption disclosures among firms and could have important managerial and regulatory implications in terms of board gender diversity and its effect on the ethical and social conduct of family firms.
Status | Finished |
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Effective start/end date | 1/10/21 → 31/03/24 |
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