Corporate sustainability practices: a new perspective of linking board with firm performance

This study investigates the impact of women directors (WOB), independent directors (BIND), board size (BSIZE), and Sustainability Committee (SC) on Firm Financial Performance (FFP) with a unique mediation of Corporate Sustainability Practices (CSP) in a stratified random sample of 255 non-financial Pakistani listed companies from 2012 to 2016. By using the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and OLS with Panel Corrected Standard Errors (PCSE), it is revealed that BIND and large BSIZE are the significant positive predictors of CSP. Besides a positive association between CSP and FFP (Tobin's Q and ROE), it is also noted that CSP positively mediates the nexus of BIND and BSIZE with FFP. However, WOB and SC have no significant or positive effect on CSP and FFP. Moreover, the significant positive effect of BIND slightly decreases with its increase beyond a certain limit in relation to CSP and FFP. The study provides several contributions to the literature and practice.