Corporate Governance Attributes and Firm-specific Features as Determinants of Sustainability Initiatives of Listed Financial and Non-Financial Companies in Nigeria

The study's population covers all listed corporations on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE), both financial and non-financial. As of December 2021, there are 168 financial and non-financial entities on the NSE (NSE Daily official listing, March 1, 2022). However, this study considers the quoted companies rated and ranked by the CSRHUB consensus economic, social, and governance (ESG) rating amongst all sectors in Nigeria because of their enormous contribution to the field of CSR globally. The time frame for the research is six (6) years, from 2016 to 2021. An assessment of companies' roles in promoting environmentally friendly practices has been conducted, as we deem it necessary to study the effect of sustainability initiatives between the financial and non-financial sectors. This study adopted a purposive sampling technique in drawing its samples. The purposive sampling procedure necessitates focusing on entities with precise structures that could offer information on a study issue (Etikan et al., 2016). Thus, twenty-six (26) corporations in Nigeria have taken a stance on corporate social responsibility, which forms the sample of this study.  

The unweighted disclosure index is used to measure SI, which is the dependent variable for this study. as in Bashiru et al. (2022); Waheed et al. (2021); Jamil et al. (2021); and Saleh et al. (2010), utilized to measure the degree of the SI dichotomous variable. If a company disclosed SI items in its annual report, it would be counted as "1," while companies that did not reveal an item would be recorded as “0” (Gujarati, 2009). Total score values for SI disclosure are aggregated from all sub-scores of SI, including 14 economic dimensions, 12 social dimensions, 15 environmental dimensions, and 15 governance dimensions. The disclosure model scoring is additive, and unweighted indexes are calculated. The disclosure indexes comprising 56 sustainability performance indicators were utilized. The total amount of scores is computed by dividing the firm's scores by the total number of potential points.   

Six independent variables are used, composed of governance attributes and firm-specific operating features. The operating features consist of company size (CSZE), company age (AGE), and leverage (LEV), while the governing features comprise board size (BSZE), board independence (BOIND), and board gender diversity (BGD). Issa et al. (2022), Abu Qa'dan and Suwaidan (2019), and Hussain et al. (2018) all agree that BSZE can be quantified by counting the number of board members. The Board of Directors' Independence (BOIND) is defined as the number of independent, non-executive directors as a percentage of all board members (Al Amosh & Khatib, 2021; Jizi & Nehme, 2018; Rashid, 2018). BGD, or board gender diversity, is the percentage of women on a board of directors relative to the total number of board members (Chams & Garca-Blandón, 2019; Orazalin & Baydauletov, 2020).   

When calculating CSZE, natural logarithms of the firm's total assets are used (Hussain et al., 2018; Crisóstomo et al., 2020). The number of years that a company has been in operation is used to calculate AGE (Issa et al., 2022). Total debt is divided by total assets to get the LEV (Crisóstomo et al., 2020; Li et al., 2018).