Measuring the impact of corporate governance on non-financial reporting in the top HEIs worldwide

Purpose – This study aims to measure the relationship between corporate governance and Non-Financial Reporting (NFR) in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Board effectiveness, student engagement, audit quality, Vice-Chancellors (VC) pay, and VC gender are targeted for analysis.Design/methodology/approach – This study is based on content analysis. We used the EU NFR Directive (2014/95/EU) to measure NFR. This includes environmental, corporate social responsibility, human rights, corporate board effectiveness, and corruption and bribery. Cross sectional data was collected form 89 HEIs worldwide across 15 different countries over three years. Content analysis, the weighted scoring method and panel data analysis are employed to obtain the results.Findings – Through a neo-institutional theoretical lens, this study provides a broader understanding of NFR content disclosure practices within HEIs. Our findings reveal that the audit quality, VC pay, and VC gender are significantly and positively associated with NFR content disclosure. However, board effectiveness has a significant negative impact on NFR content disclosure. More interestingly, our findings reveal that student engagement has an insignificant association with NFR content disclosure and there significant difference on the level of NFR content disclosure across universities situated in different geographical region such as USA, Australia, UK, and EU, Asia & Canada. Our findings have important implications for regulators and policymakers. Our evidence appears to be robust when controlling for possible endogeneities.Originality/value – The study contributes to the literature on corporate non-financial disclosure as it provides new insights of corporate governance mechanism and NFR disclosure within HEIs.