Governance-led intellectual capital disclosure: Empirical evidence from Pakistan

The study objective is to empirically examine the relationship between intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) and corporate governance with a specific focus on the role of family ownership. Secondary data of 99 Pakistan Stock Exchange listed manufacturing firms pertaining to the 2008-2017 period were obtained from the annual statements of these companies. Owing to the non-linear role of family ownership in corporate governance, quadratic regression was employed to estimate the relationship between the degree of IC disclosure and various attributes of corporate governance. Study findings confirm that the relationship between ICD and family ownership follows the familiar inverted U-shaped curve, whereby the degree of IC disclosure tends to decrease once family ownership exceeds 22.64%. Moreover, analysis results depict a significantly positive impact of board independence, presence of an audit committee, and foreign ownership on ICD. Conversely, CEO duality was found to be negatively associated with the degree of ICD. In further analyses, IC disclosure was disaggregated into three major dimensions, namely internal capital, external capital, and human capital, yielding congruent findings. Thus, for effective IC disclosure, the study findings indicate that it is necessary to improve the governance mechanisms. It would also be beneficial for firms to restrict the family ownership to a certain level in order keep the information disclosure optimal. Since these recommendations are based on analyses of secondary data pertaining to a limited number of indicators of corporate governance pertaining to Pakistani manufacturing firms, any generalizations should be attempted with care.