This research paper examines risk information disclosures in Canadian annual reports to provide insights into the current risk disclosure environment, its characteristics, and the analytical usefulness of the information disclosed to the firm's stakeholders. Following a content analysis, the authors describe and then analyze in greater detail the subject matter of risk disclosures of TSE 300 Canadian companies by summarizing and classifying disclosed risk‐related information. Results show a high degree of risk disclosure intensity reflecting both mandatory and voluntary risk management disclosures. However, the analytical power of such disclosures, as captured by the risk assessment analysis, appears to lack uniformity, clarity, and quantification, thus potentially limiting their usefulness. The authors conclude that more formalized and comprehensive risk disclosures might be desirable in the future to effectively reduce information asymmetries between management and stakeholders. Résumé La présente étude analyse les divulgations d'informations sur le risque dans les rapports annuels canadiens. Elle se propose de jeter une lumière sur l'environnement actuel de divulgation des risques, ses caractéristiques, et l'utilité analytique des informations divulguées pour les acteurs de l'industrie canadienne. Grâce à la méthode de l'analyse du contenu, les auteurs décrivent puis analysent de faĉon plus détaillée le contenu actuel des divulgations d'informations sur le risque des entreprises du TSE 300. Ils y parviennent en synthétisant et en catégorisant les informations divulguées. Les résultats montrent que les divulgations se font à une fréquence assez élevée, consécutive aux divulgations obligatoires et volontaires de gestion des risques. Cependant, vu la manière dont l'analyse d'évaluation des risques divulgue ces informations, leur pouvoir analytique semble manquer d'homogénéité, de clarté, et de quantification, ce qui limite potentiellement leur utilité. Les auteurs concluent qu'à l'avenir, les divulgations de risques gagneraient à être plus formalisées et plus complètes. Ceci permettrait de réduire l'asymétrie des informations entre les gestionnaires des risques et les investisseurs.

This paper is the first multi-country investigation of comprehensive corporate risk disclosure. Based on a detailed content analysis of 160 annual reports, we analyze the attributes and the quantity of risk disclosure and its association with the level of firm risk in the U.S., Canadian, U.K., and German settings. We find a consistent pattern where risk disclosure is most prevalent in management reports, concentrates on financial risk categories, and comprises little quantitative and forward-looking disclosure across sample countries. In terms of risk disclosure quantity, U.S. firms generally dominate, followed by German firms. Cross-country variation in risk disclosure attributes can only partly be linked to domestic disclosure regulation, suggesting that risk disclosure incentives play an important role. While risk disclosure quantity appears to be positively associated with proxies of firm risk in the North American settings, we find a negative association with leverage for Germany. This coincides with a “concealing motive” implied by an insider role of banks in the German financial setting.

Environmental performance, environmental risk and risk management are of contemporary interest, but to date there is limited evidence on their relationships. This paper is the first to provide detailed insights by adopting a content analysis approach and disaggregating firm-level environmental risk into types related to regulations, operations and nature. For a sample of US firms in polluting sectors, descriptive findings show that the level of risk and the likelihood of active risk management differ in the type considered. Environmental performance, risk and the likelihood of risk management all differ across firms and industries. Multiple regressions reveal a negative association between environmental performance and environmental risk, the extent of which depends on the type of risk. Results hold when controlling for active risk management, which is not found to contribute significantly to environmental performance. Our findings have implications for public policy and suggest that linkages to environmental risk and risk management are worth exploring in more differential ways and beyond industry-level assessments in environmental studies.

This paper examines the nature and extent of potential linkages between corporate governance characteristics and bankruptcy filing decisions. To test the paper's research hypotheses and follow prior related literature, a sample of financially distressed firms was formed and matched with a group of financially healthy firms in the US between 2001 and 2003. Results show that in addition to lower business and financial health indicators faced by financially distressed firms compared to their financially healthy counterparts, the former group also faced higher director turnover and shorter outside director tenure. In addition, the results indicate that interactions between two or more corporate governance characteristics could have a significant impact on the bankruptcy filing decision, thus suggesting that a multi-theory foundation for governance research could be warranted in the future. Further research is needed to investigate in more depth how boards and management work together, change, make decisions and manage their reputations and careers, not only in the case of financial distress but also in normal business situations. 1 A large body of the literature examining governance and financial distress has been published in the late 1980s through the early and mid-1990s, for example Hambrick and D'

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