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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Corporate social and environmental disclosure as a sustainable development tool provided by board sub-committees: Do women directors play a relevant moderating role?

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This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Corporate social and environmental disclosure as a sustainable development tool provided by board sub-committees: Do women directors play a relevant moderating role?, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1002/bse.2815. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions The aim of this research is to examine the impact of three audit committee characteristics on corporate social and environmental responsibility (CSR) disclosure: the existence of an audit committee, audit committee independence, and audit committee financial expertise. Moreover, this research analyzes the moderating effect of board gender diversity between these audit committees' attributes and CSR reporting. The results of analyzing 13,178 firm-year observations of non-financial companies show that the presence of an audit committee and audit committee financial expertise are positively associated with CSR disclosure. However, a higher proportion of non-executive directors in audit committees has a negative effect on the disclosure of CSR information. These findings suggest that some audit committees' features play an important role in ensuring the reporting of environmental, social, and economic information. Our evidence also indicates that the presence of female directors on boards increases the positive impact of financial expert membership of audit committees on CSR disclosure, while women directors moderate any negative effect of the percentage of independent directors on audit committees on CSR reporting by increasing the latter. In addition, female directors moderate the positive impact of the existence of an audit committee on the disclosure of CSR information by reducing the latter. The authors wish to acknowledge the financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness for the research project ECO 2017-82259-R and from the University Jaume I for the research project UJI-B2018-15. The authors are also grateful to the Junta de Castilla y León and the European Regional Development Fund (Grant CLU-2019-03) for the financial support to the Research Unit of Excellence “Economic Management for Sustainability” (GECOS).