Readability of integrated reports: Evidence from worldwide adopters

Abstract

Integrated reporting (IR) represents the last frontier of corporate disclosure and aims to include material financial and nonfinancial information in a single document. One of the main objectives of IR, in the idea conceived by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC), is to provide recipients with written information in a clear, understandable, and accessible way. In light of this goal, this study, using stakeholder theory, aims to examine the readability of integrated reports and the factors capable of affecting this level of readability. The analysis, conducted on a sample of 221 international companies that published an integrated report in 2020, shows a low level of readability of the integrated reports examined. Furthermore, it demonstrates a positive effect of firm size and financial leverage on the level of readability of the integrated reports, also highlighting a nonsignificant impact of firm profitability. Our results offer important contributions to theory and practice.

Measuring quality of popular annual financial reports: Features of the rewarded US reporting municipalities

“…The Flesh Reading Ease score ranges from 0 to 100 (Flesch, 1979). A high score indicates a text that is more readable and therefore easy to interpret even for readers with less understanding (Adhariani & Du Toit, 2020; Raimo et al, 2022). Clarity examines the presence of images, tables and graphs and their connection with the narrative flow.…”

“…The dependent variable of this study is represented by the PAFRQ which corresponds to the quality of a particular type of disclosure tool represented by the popular annual financial report. Disclosure represents the flow of information provided to meet the information needs of stakeholders (Raimo et al, 2021(Raimo et al, , 2022Vitolla et al, 2020Vitolla et al, , 2021. It represents an element without intrinsic characteristics that allows a user to establish its intensity or quality (Wallace & Naser, 1995).…”

Exploring intellectual capital disclosure and its determinants in knowledge-based institutions: empirical evidence from international universities

“…Following Manes-Rossi et al (2018), USIZE was calculated using the natural logarithm of the number of enrolled students. BSIZE was instead calculated as the number of members included within the university’s board of directors (Manes-Rossi et al , 2018), while BDIV was calculated as the percentage of female directors within the board (Vitolla et al , 2020a, 2020b; Raimo et al , 2022a, 2022b). Following Manes-Rossi et al (2018), INTVIS was measured as the natural logarithm of the results of a search in “Google.com” in which the university appeared.…”

Are vegans generous? An exploration of the success factors of vegan crowdfunding projects

“…This readability index assesses the approximate reading grade level of a text and varies from 0 to 100, where 0 represents the lowest reading ease. The index was calculated using the "readable.com" software (Raimo et al, 2022).…”

“…We employed the readability score (RS) to determine the ease of understanding the project description. Thus, we employed the Flesch Reading Ease Score developed by Flesch (1948), one of the oldest and most widely used for measuring text readability among researchers (Raimo et al, 2022). The Flesch Reading Ease Score was computed using the following formula: "206.835 À (1.015 3 average sentence length) À (84.6 * average syllables per word)."…”