Assessing the Effects of Corporate Governance Attributes on the Quality of Directors-Related Information Disclosure: The Empirical Study of Malaysian Top 100 Companies

This study attempts to investigate the effects of corporate governance (CG) mechanisms towards the quality of directors-related information (DRI) disclosure of Malaysian Top 100 companies, after controlling variables of firm-specific characteristics such as firm size and auditor size. A DRI disclosure was measured using scoring worksheet developed by Ramli (2001) to score the items in the corporate annual reports. Consistent with expectations, the Spearman correlation showed there are statistically proven the positive associations between board independence, board diversity managerial ownership and DRI disclosure at 5 percent level, with the exception of CEO duality. The result appears to suggest that there were positive impact of the CG mechanisms on the quality of DRI disclosure among Malaysian Top 100 largest companies which were ranked by the Minority Shareholders Watchdog Group (MSWG) based on their market capitalisation. However, the regression model reported R2 of 38.1 percent which means that almost 62 percent of those factors influencing the DI disclosure have not been captured by the model. These other factors may perhaps be identified through future research involving larger sample or other research method such as by questionnaire surveys or interviews.