CEO Characteristics and Sustainable Finance Disclosure in Indonesian Listed Banks

Abstract

This study examines the role of chief executive officer (CEO) characteristics in shaping sustainable finance disclosure (SFD) in the Indonesian banking sector. The analysis covers banking companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange during the 2020 to 2024 period and considers four CEO attributes, namely age, educational attainment, professional experience, and tenure, guided by upper echelon theory. Using purposive sampling, 209 firm year observations were obtained from 47 listed banks after outlier removal. Panel data regression was applied, and the fixed effect model was selected as the final estimation approach based on the Chow and Hausman tests. The findings show that CEO age and educational attainment have a positive and significant effect on the extent of sustainable finance disclosure, while professional experience and CEO tenure show no significant effect. Firm size, used as a control variable, is also positively associated with disclosure. These results suggest that the demographic and educational attributes of top executives play an important role in promoting transparency and sustainability related disclosure in the banking industry, and they extend upper echelon theory to the context of a developing country with a strong sustainable finance mandate.

Keywords:  sustainable finance disclosure, CEO characteristics, CEO age, CEO education, upper echelon theory