Does corporate governance report disclosure increase stock retirement? Evidence from Korea

Abstract

This study examines the influence of the mandatory disclosure of corporate governance reports on stock retirement in Korea. Given the challenges of applying stock repurchasing to measure shareholder return policy in the Korean stock market, this study focuses on stock retirement as a key indicator to examine the effectiveness of introducing the corporate governance report on shareholder return policy. Employing the Difference-in-Differences approach followed, this paper conducts empirical analyses based on 5,932 observations from 2011 to 2020. The main findings indicate a significant increase in stock retirement by companies implementing mandatory disclosures of corporate governance reports (coef = 0.018, p-value <0.01) compared to companies that do not disclose them. The results of the alternative measures for stock retirement and propensity score matching (PSM) model also present a positive association between mandatory disclosure of corporate governance reports and stock retirement, respectively (coef = 0.400 and 1.421, p-value <0.01; coef = 0.019, p-value < 0.1). This study provides evidence to support the notion that introducing corporate governance reports enhances overall shareholder returns, leading to an increase in stock retirement. Moreover, these findings validate that stock retirement is an adequate proxy for analyzing the level of shareholder returns in Korean firms.