Abstract
The study considers the effects of board diversity on corporate governance compliance and disclosure (CGDI) in East African context. Using hand-collected data of 92 listed firms from 2007 to 2017, we find ethnic and female board representation to exert a positive and significant influence on CG disclosure. Further, we document that appointment of additional ethnic/female director from one-to-two, and from two-to-three or more in the boardroom makes a marginal contribution to greater corporate governance disclosure, suggesting that the marginal effect of additional female/ethnic director is significantly higher for firms with balanced boards relative to unbalanced boards. However, our evidence suggests that whilst the marginal contribution of the subsequent appointment of additional ethnic minority in the boardroom, increase at increasing rate, the marginal contribution of subsequent appointment of female director increases at diminishing rate. The results are robust to various econometric estimations after controlling for alternative specifications, and endogeneity concerns.