No abstract

Sustainable reports are the basic tool used to reflect and communicate stakeholder dialogue. Therefore, sustainability reporting has become a key element for strategic management. Companies' strategies are defined and developed by their boards of directors. This study explores the relationship between sustainability reporting and the existence of at least three women on the board of directors. Our results show that in countries with a higher proportion of boards of directors with at least three women, the levels of CSR reporting are higher. We also find that countries with higher gender equality have more companies with boards of directors with at least three women. We control for other variables that affect differences among countries and differences in CSR reporting as found in previous studies: cultural differences, law enforcement, GDP, industry and regulation. Our paper contributes to the literature by studying the relationship between board gender composition and CSR reporting. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the quality of the sustainability information issued following the three most common reporting models: annual report (addressed to shareholders), sustainability report (addressed to stakeholders), and integrated report (addressed to shareholders). To this aim, we create a quality index based on previous literature, analyzing the content of the sustainability information disclosed by Spanish listed companies during the years 2013 to 2015. We find that companies issuing sustainability reports or integrated reports provide higher quality information than companies including their sustainability information within the annual report. We also find that sustainability reports are issued with higher quality than integrated reports. Both findings indicate that companies in Spain are engaged in a dialogue with all stakeholders, not only shareholders. Our results offer insights on the need to improve the framework of the integrated report in order to achieve the objectives of the International Integrated Reporting Council and to get a speed up in the adoption of this new reporting tool.

Using generalised linear mixed models as a statistical tool, this paper analyses the factors that explain the decision of a company to assure their sustainability report and of the choice of a Big 4 auditor as assuror. Specifically, we investigate the variables that affect the two dependent variables, existence of assurance and the profile of the assuror, at two different levels: the characteristics of the reporting company, and the country in which the company is located. Previous literature has explained this relationship as the result of linear regression models, considering only the fixed effects of the factors. Taking into account random effects, we are able to arrive at more precise conclusions on the effect of country (legal tradition and European membership) and company variables (size, public or non-public, industry and integrated reporting), on the existence of assurance and the profile of the assuror.

No abstract