Resumo

Corruption is “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain” (Transparency International, 2020b) or “the use of power for private gain” (Duho et al., 2020). Corruption can affect the functioning of companies with the increase of their costs (Sari et al., 2020). Board of directors has the role of advising and monitoring the firm in which it operates (El Gammal et al., 2020; Karim et al., 2020).

The objective of the paper is to analyze the influence of board diversity (gender diversity, board independence diversity, board skill diversity and board size) on the anticorruption disclosure. This study examines the association between board diversity and anticorruption disclosure using the lenses of stakeholder, resource dependence, agency and upper echelons theories.

In last years, corruption has become a concern of all firms and governments around the world (Nobanee & Ellili, 2020). The diversity of the board allows managers to provide the resources necessary for effective management of the various stakeholders (Harjoto et al., 2015; Oh et al., 2019) and board diversity acts to reduce conflict between principal and agent by encouraging managers to disseminate information, generating better social performance (Hoang et al., 2018; Zaid et al., 2020).

To test the hypotheses, we use a sample composed of 1047 firm-year observation from 287 firms from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru between 2015 and 2019. Anticorruption disclosure is presented in this study as the dependent variable.We test our hypotheses using Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM). HLM can address several problems of traditional regression models because it deals with poorly estimated accuracy and analysis unit problems (Bryk & Raudenbush, 1992).

We find a positive and significant relationship between board specific skills diversity and anticorruption in Latin America firms. This result is consistent with stakeholder, agency, upper echelons and resource dependency theories. A negative and insignificant relationship between gender diversity and anticorruption was also found. In addition, we noted a positive and insignificant relationship between board independence diversity and board size and anticorruption disclosure.

This study analyzes the link between board diversity and anticorruption disclosure. Using a data of 287 Latin America firms over a 5-year period (2015-2019), we employ Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) to test study hypotheses. We measure anticorruption disclosure as the ratio between the aggregate of 7 items focused on anticorruption issues and the total number of items analyzed. We also use the Blau index to measure board diversity (gender diversity, board specific skills diversity and board independence diversity).

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