The disclosure of non-financial information by stock-exchange-listed companies in Poland, in the light of the changes introduced by the Directive 2014/95/EU

Abstract

Beginning in 2017, stock-exchange-listed companies in Poland have been obliged to publish non-financial information. This is due to the implementation of Directive 2014/95/EU in Polish law, which requires the dis- closure of extended non-financial information on the part of specified large public-interest companies and capi- tal groups. Taking the above into consideration, the aim of this article is to answer the following questions: 1) What is the state of the non-financial disclosures made by stock-exchange-listed companies in Poland? 2) What are the differences in reporting non-financial information by companies from various industries? 3) What factors affect the disclosure of non-financial information? In total, 53 companies were researched. The results obtained indicate that the form of the disclosures varies. Most commonly, non-financial information was presented in management commentaries. The scope of the information presented was diverse. The most non-financial disclosures were made by companies from the chemical and the energy sectors. The following factors influenced the publication of this type of information: the entity’s size, its market value and the industry to which a given company belongs. In contrast, no positive associations between the economic performance of a company and non-financial disclosure, nor between the financial leverage of a company and non-financial disclosure have been found, with the exception of companies from the low-profile sector. The studies involved content analysis and the Tobit regression model. Existing results of research on non-financial reporting made by stock-exchange-listed companies in Poland did not en- compass the last reporting period prior to the introduction of the changes to the Act on Accounting. Therefore, the results obtained allow us to determine the degree of preparation on the part of the researched companies belonging to various sectors (of larger and smaller environmental nuisance).

Encompassing Non-Financial Reporting in A Coercive Framework for Enhancing Social Responsibility: Romanian Listed Companies’ Case

“…The significance of the results is validated by the R square coefficient value and the analysis of variance performed using the ANOVA test, which reveals each relationship's strength. Thus, the company's size has the strongest influence, followed by its performance and the sensitivity of the industry to which they belong, thus being in line with prior evidence (Duran and Rodrigo, 2018;Sierra-Garcia et al, 2018;Szadziewska et al, 2018;Galant and Cerne, 2017). Moreover, we also tested the robustness of the proposed model.…”

“…In the second stage, for performing the regression analysis aimed to identify possible factors influencing transparency enacted through the EUD (RQ2), we selected the potential determinants of the NFI disclosure (dependent variable) according to prior studies conducted on a similar topic. Among the most analyzed factors influencing there are the company size (measured by the number of employees, total assets or market capitalization), profitability (measured by ROA/ROE), financial leverage, Tobin's Q, business sector, assurance, type of reporting (Szadziewska et al, 2018;Sierra-Garcia et al, 2018;Duran and Rodrigo, 2018;Venturelli et al, 2017;Galant and Cerne, 2017). A summary of the independent variables considered in this research comprising their definition, proxies and reference authors is presented in table no.…”

“…Thus, most researchers conducted an ex-ante analysis of the non-financial reporting and its determinants (Carini et al, 2018;Szadziewska et al, 2018;Dumitru et al, 2017;Galant and Cerne, 2017), while there are few ex-post evidences (Sierra-Garcia et al, 2018;Venturelli et al, 2017;Matuszak and Rozanska, 2017). For example, the quality of CSR disclosure in Polish-listed Companies in the light of EUD requirements (Matuszak and Rozanska, 2017), the compliance to the EU Guidelines 2017/C215/01 with the IIRF and the GRI 4 guidelines on the European companies (Manes-Rossi et al, 2018), the level of non-financial and diversity disclosure and the transposition of the EUD into Italian law (Venturelli et al, 2017) or the level of completeness of NFI and the expected impact of the EUD in oil and gas sector (Carini et al, 2018) and the clarity of reports published by organizations (containing elements related to bioeconomy) in Europe (Avram et al, 2018).…”

“…Szadziewska et al (2018);Sierra-Garcia et al (2018);Duran and Rodrigo (2018);Galant and Cerne (2017) EMPLThe natural logarithm of the total number of employees at the end of the fiscal yearVenturelli et al (2017); Galant and Cerne (-The ratio of the annual net income to the total assets at the year's endSzadziewska et al (2018);Duran and Rodrigo (2018);Galant and Cerne (2017) ROE Return on equity -The ratio of the annual net income to the stockholders' equity at the end…”

Towards 2014/95/EU directive compliance: the case of Poland

“…Therefore, it was reasonable to expect a high level of compliance with the EU Guidelines 2017/C215/01, especially in relation to social and environmental matters. These values are higher than those obtained in previous similar studies conducted by Hoffmann et al (2018), Venturelli et al (2017), Matuszak and R o_ za nska (2017), Dyduch and Krasodomska (2017), Szadziewska et al (2018) and Gus , e et al (2016), which focused on a single country.…”