Datasets for corporate governance index of Jordanian non-financial sector firms

This article covers comprehensive data on firm-level corporate governance practices as imposed by the Jordan Securities Commission (JSC). The study includes panel data for 95 non-financial Jordanian listed firms (industrial and service sector) in Amman Stock Exchange (ASE). The time frame used for this study is from 2012 to 2017. Data presented were extracted from the annual reports of each firm. The annual reports had been downloaded from the official website of the ASE. The data can be used easily by the researcher to develop and calculate a corporate governance index that involves thirty-two internal governance attributes and is comprised of three equally weighted sub-indices. The first sub-index which is “Disclosure and Transparency” consists of 15 unique attributes. While the second sub-index, “Board Effectiveness and Composition” consists of 9 unique attributes. The last sub-index which is “Shareholders Rights” consists of 8 unique attributes. Thus, the un-weighted corporate governance index has an important feature that is easily replicated and modified, enabling the researcher to rate firms based on an aggregate index score or by using the sub-indices score also.


Specifications
Accounting Specific subject area Corporate governance Type of data Table (Excel file) How data were acquired The dataset was manually collected from the annual reports of firms by using content analysis and annual reports downloaded from the official website of ASE. Data format Filtered Parameters for data collection Non-financial firms sector listed in ASE and had available information for the current study during the entire study period. The non-financial firms sharing the same requirements as imposed by the JSC, for instance, the corporate governance code. This study excluded the financial firms' sector due to variations in the regulatory framework of non-financial sector firms. Description of data collection The data were hand-collected from the annual reports of each firms for the pertaining years that were published at the official website of ASE. Depending on content analysis of 95 non-financial firms annual reports for six years observations (2012-2017). Data source location Jordan Data with this article.
The data are attached within this article

Value of the data
• The dataset includes unique attributes and comprehensive corporate governance practices in the Jordanian non-financial sector in the absence of a systematic technique or standardized system to measure the compliance of firms with the country's corporate governance code. • The data could be useful for researchers, investors, and firms to assess firms' compliance with corporate governance provisions. • The data can be useful in constructing a corporate governance index for assessing and ranking non-financial firms' compliance with corporate governance provisions. This assessment can be used by investors to make comparisons between firms so they can make appropriate investment decisions. • The data can be valuable for researchers to explore the relationship between corporate governance indices and financial/operating performance of firms. • The holistic evaluation of corporate governance by using governance indices offer complementary views.

Data description
The cross-sectional data encompass of 570 year-observations of 95 non-financial firms recorded in the ASE database for six years from 2012 to 2017. We also retrieved some data from the Securities Depository Center (SDC). These datasets can be used to develop a corporate governance index based on a binary scale of attributes in Table 2 . Thus, the industrial sector firms of 49 firms are distributed over 9 segments, while the services sector firms containing 46 firms are distributed over 8 segments as shown in Table 1 . Table 1 shows the frequency of governance elements in non-financial Jordanian firms. It also demonstrates the frequency based on main sectors which had been classified to industrial sector firms that include segments (

Experimental design, materials, and methods
We collected the 32 governance elements for each non-financial firm individually. All governance elements in Table 2 were converted to a binary variant. The elements were coded as "1" if a firm has the attribute and "0" otherwise. The dichotomous variables were used for constructing the corporate governance index for non-financial Jordanian firms. Following Al Malkawi et al. [1] , each attribute in the index is based on a binary scale taking a value of (1 or 0). The value of 1 indicates the existence/ commitment of the attribute and 0 indicates the absence/ noncommitment. The final maximum value obtained is 32. This value is assigned to those firms that comply with all the attributes and later on converted (scaled) to a percentage. Finally, these data for all firms were merged to build a combined datasheet. The binary scoring is considered suitable for measuring the corporate governance index, due to the nature of each attribute that had been used to construct the index. In addition, Nerantzidis [2] confirms that binary scoring is considered excellent in research that intended to present firms' compliance scores.