How capital markets assess the credibility and accuracy of CSR reporting: Exploring the effects of assurance quality and CSR restatement issuance

This research examines how the credibility and accuracy of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures enhance market confidence by exploring their effect on the cost of capital. How do capital markets react to higher-quality assurance of CSR reporting? Can the hypothetical reduction in the cost of capital that assurance quality produces be explained by restatements of previous information given in these CSR reports? We explore the relationship between assurance quality, as a proxy for credibility and market confidence, and the mediating effect of CSR restatements as indicators of accuracy. We propose regression models with a sample of CSR reports issued by European companies. Building upon the signalling and legitimacy theories, the results support the positive effect of higher assurance quality statements on market confidence by confirming a decrease in the cost of capital; assurance quality gives an indication of credibility to the capital market and restatements related to methodological updates signal accuracy. The reduction in the cost of capital brought on by higher assurance quality appears to be determined by the issuance of CSR restatements, which create legitimacy for both client companies and assurance providers. CSR reporting and assurance have reached a greater level of maturity as demonstrated by the evolution of these practices and financial market perceptions.     

Mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Reporting and Financial Reporting Quality: Evidence from a Quasi-Natural Experiment

This study examines the impact of mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting on firms’ financial reporting quality using a quasi-natural experiment in China that mandates a subset of firms to report their CSR activities starting in 2008. We find that mandatory CSR disclosure firms constrain earnings management after the policy. The result is robust to a battery of sensitivity tests and more prominent for firms with lower analyst coverage. Further analyses reveal that upward earnings management by mandatory disclosure firms is more likely to be caught after the policy. The findings suggest that mandatory CSR disclosure mitigates information asymmetry by improving financial reporting quality.     

Assurance of corporate social responsibility reports: Does it reduce decoupling practices?

Recent research shows the existence of a selective corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure strategy that creates a gap between CSR disclosure and actual performance. These CSR decoupling practices compromise the credibility of CSR reports and have triggered a demand for the adoption of credibility enhancement mechanisms, such as adherence to the global reporting initiative (GRI) reporting guidelines, and the external assurance of CSR reports. The effectiveness of such mechanisms is not clear, however. This paper draws on legitimacy theory and addresses the issue of symbolic versus substantive use of assurance, and compliance with GRI reporting standards, by analysing their effect on CSR decoupling using an international sample of 1,939 companies (15,219 observations from 2002 to 2017). Analysis of a sub-sample of 708 firms (3,730 observations from 2011 to 2017) also shows that the application of GRI guidelines and the specific characteristics of the assurance provider—accountant, experience and specialisation—reduce CSR decoupling practices. The results provide researchers, managers, assurance providers, investors, stakeholders and regulators with additional insight into the value of the external assurance of sustainability reports and have important managerial and policy implications.     

On the Determinants of Corporate Social Responsibility: International Evidence on the Financial Industry

This article sets out to undertake a thorough, point-by-point examination of the theory postulated by Campbell (2007), in which an attempt is made to specify the conditions under which corporations may or may not act in socially responsible ways. In order to ensure the overall reliability of our study, and to attempt to provide a new understanding of, and greater insights into, whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) is affected by financial and institutional variables, we empirically investigate a total of 520 financial firms in 34 countries, between the years 2003 and 2005. Our empirical findings are: (i) firms with larger size are more CSR minded, and the financial performance and CSR are not related; (ii) firms would actually act in more socially responsible ways to enhance their competitive advantages when the market competitiveness is more intense; (iii) financial firms in countries with stronger levels of legal enforcement tend to engage in more CSR activities; however, interestingly and rather strikingly, those firms in countries with stronger shareholder rights tend to engage in less CSR activities; and (iv) self-regulation within the financial industry has a significantly positive effect on CSR, with firms being found to act in more socially responsible ways in those countries which have more cooperative employer–employee relations, higher quality management schools, and a better macroeconomic environment.     

Corporate social responsibility and bank risk profile: evidence from Europe

This study analyzes the impact of risk profile on sustainability reporting and its quality in European banks. Financial institutions (FI) play a social role in the financial inclusion process and incorporate environmental considerations into credit risk assessment, making corporate social responsibility (CSR)-related issues vital for risk management systems. FI with lower capital risk, higher liquidity risk, higher profitability in banking, and higher sensitivity to market risk tend to issue CSR reports. The findings suggest that FI with lower profitability in banking disclose higher quality CSR financial services sector (FSS)-specific information, whereas FI not submitting CSR reports for external assurance or having their CSR reports assured by certain auditors issue lower quality CSR/FSS-specific information.     

“一带一路”倡议下投资母国的监管义务与法律对策

随着"一带一路"倡议全面、深入推进,中国企业海外投资进入新时期。然而,"一带一路"沿线国家投资环境复杂,中国企业面临社会责任风险以及沿线国腐败程度较高等新问题。现有国际规则无法有效处理东道国经济发展与这些问题之间的冲突和矛盾,不仅威胁中国企业的经济安全,更影响"一带一路"倡议的顺利实施。实践中,东道国宽松的法律环境、负责任的主权和维护国家形象的需要为母国监管提供了现实基础。因此,中国应以"自我约束"和"规则导向"为前提,在充分借鉴国际经验的基础上强化国内投资法律体系,从企业社会责任和海外反腐败两个方面积极承担投资母国的监管义务,主动规制中国企业的海外投资行为,实现国内法治与国际法治的良性互动。在企业社会责任方面,中国应针对海外投资者企业社会责任问题专项立法,提高中国企业承担社会责任的标准,区分企业性质、承担不同的社会责任标准以及建立社会责任评估体系;在海外反腐败方面,中国应完善惩治海外投资腐败行为的立法并加大执法力度,同时增强"一带一路"沿线国的刑事司法协助以及提高惩治海外投资腐败活动的力度。     

Bribery in International Business Transactions

Globalization leads to cross-border business transactions between societies with very different norms and regulations regarding bribery. Bribery in international business transactions can be seen as a function of not only the demand for such bribes in different countries, but the supply, or willingness to provide bribes by multinational firms and their representatives. This study addresses the propensity of firms from 30 different countries to engage in international bribery. The study incorporates both domestic (economic development, culture, and domestic corruption in the supplying country) and international factors (those countries’ patterns of trade and involvement in international accords) in explaining the willingness to bribe abroad. The propensity to provide bribes was the lowest when corruption was not tolerated in the multinational firms’ home countries, when the firms’ countries were signatories of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) anti-bribery convention, and when those countries traded heavily with wealthier nations. Further, these findings are maintained when controlling for levels of economic development and cultural values in the supplying country. In terms of culture, firms from high power distance countries showed a somewhat greater propensity for providing bribes in transactions with less-developed nations.     

Corruption,Types of Corruption and Firm Financial Performance: New Evidence from a Transitional Economy

Using a nationwide survey of provincial institutional quality and a sample of private manufacturing small and medium scale enterprises (the SMEs), this paper contributes to the literature by considering for the first time the effects of corruption on the financial performance of Vietnamese private SMEs. Interestingly, contrary to previous findings, we find that corruption when measured by a dummy variable, does not affect firms’ financial performance after controlling for heterogeneity, simultaneity and dynamic endogeneity. However, the intensity of bribery and the majority of the forms of corruption were found to have negative impacts on firms’ financial performance. Hence, a typical approach using only a dummy variable for bribery might not adequately evaluate the impact of bribe intensity or even ignores the negative impacts of some types of bribes on firms’ financial performance. The findings suggest that anti-corruption measures are vital for the development of the Vietnamese private SMEs.     

Political embeddedness,media positioning and corporate social responsibility: Evidence from China

We examine the effect of political embeddedness and media positioning on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Using a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2009–2017, we provide evidence that firms with political embeddedness from the perspectives of both government ownership and managerial political connection (PC) perform more CSR than other firms, but their motivations for doing so are different. Employing media positioning, we find that firms controlled by the government conduct less CSR when they receive more positive media reporting, indicating that this is a firm's passive choice due to political pressure; and firms with PC are incentivized by negative media reporting to conduct more CSR, indicating an active choice to maintain political legitimacy. This association is robust to different media positioning measurements and endogeneity checks. Additional analyses show that this relationship is more pronounced in central government-controlled firms and regionally politically connected firms; in firms that disclose CSR reports voluntarily; and in the environment where CSR are more valued (following the 2012 national Anti-corruption Campaign and in provinces with higher levels of marketization). Overall, our study suggests that media positioning can help to identify the motivation for conducting CSR.     

Collectivism and Corruption in Commercial Loan Production: How to Break the Curse?

Recent research suggests that collectivism breeds corruption in bank lending. This finding, together with the stickiness of culture, poses a direct challenge to economic growth in collectivist societies. In this paper, we address this grim outlook by examining the types of firms that are susceptible to the detrimental effect of collectivism on lending integrity and the formal institutions that can help alleviate such effect. We find that the adverse effect of collectivism on bank corruption is more severe in small and medium-sized firms, privately owned firms, and non-exporting firms, while it is considerably weaker in countries with more effective private monitoring, a higher (lower) fraction of foreign-owned (government-owned) banks, a more competitive banking sector, better information sharing, and stronger legal and political institutions. Our findings are robust to using alternative measures of collectivism and alternative dependent variables. These results highlight how firm-level characteristics and formal institutions interact with collectivism in affecting firms’ access to bank credit.     

Firm Internationalization and Corporate Social Responsibility

Using a large sample of 3,040 U.S. firms and 16,606 firm-year observations over the 1991–2010 period, we find strong evidence that firm internationalization is positively related to the firm’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) rating. This finding persists when we use alternative estimation methods, samples, and proxies for internationalization and when we address endogeneity concerns. We also provide evidence that the positive relation between internationalization and CSR rating holds for a large sample of firms from 44 countries. Finally, we offer novel evidence that firms with extensive foreign subsidiaries in countries with well-functioning political and legal institutions have better CSR ratings. Our findings shed light on the role of internationalization in influencing multinational firms’ CSR activities in the U.S. and around the world.     

Factors Influencing the Incidence of Bribery Payouts by Firms: A Cross-Country Analysis

This article explores micro- and macro-level variables that influence the incidence of bribery payouts by firms. A rich data set with information from 55 countries was utilized to achieve this objective. Results of logit regression models indicate that there are a number of micro- and macro-level factors that significantly affect the incidence of bribery payouts. This suggests that it is not only the characteristics of a firm but also the environment of doing business that affect the firm’s bribery decision. The results of this study provides information that may help firms develop strategies to reduce corruption in their respective industries and thereby improve their image of corporate social responsibility. The analysis also points to possible policy directions that governments could undertake in order to reduce the incidence of bribery in their country.      

跨国公司企业社会责任国别差异性的原因与对策

人们通常认为跨国公司在母国和东道国会同样好地履行企业社会责任义务.但研究表明,跨国公司企业社会责任的表现可能在不同国家中存在明显的差异性.存在这种差异性的原因主要是企业内部成本压力、内控困境、外部制度偏差、政府监管缺陷和法律环境差异等,建议通过完善相关法规,建立国际合作和交流机制,加大监督、检查和执法力度,加强宣传教育与媒体报道等措施加以有效应对.     

CEO personality and language use in CSR reporting

We explore the relationship between chief executive officer (CEO) personality traits and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting. Upper echelons theory indicates that the values, experiences, and personalities of top organizational managers influence their organization's strategic decisions and effectiveness. We utilize IBM Watson Personality Insights software to infer CEOs’ personality traits based on their responses to questions raised by analysts during year-end conference calls; we obtain CEOs’ Big Five personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—from which we compute a measure of their risk tolerance. Using a longitudinal dataset of Standard and Poor's 500 firms for 2008–2015, we document that high CEO risk tolerance is related to lower CSR report readability and smaller CSR disclosure volume. This finding indicates that executives who are comfortable with greater risk are more willing to supply stakeholders with reports that are shorter and require greater effort to understand. Exploration of the association between CEO Big Five personality traits and CSR report readability and disclosure volume allows key stakeholders to better comprehend CSR disclosures and connotations thereof. Overall, our results contribute to the debate on how CEO personality traits affect organizations’ CSR disclosure reporting strategies, and support upper echelons theory in the CSR setting.     

The Masculinisation of Ethical Leadership Dis/embodiment

Using a worldwide sample, we examine whether corporate social responsibility (CSR) performance has an impact on the value of cash holdings. We find that investors assign a higher value to cash held by firms that have a high CSR rating. This result is consistent with the idea that CSR policies are a means for managers to act in the shareholders’ interests by mitigating conflicts with stakeholders. Finally, we reveal that CSR performance has a positive impact on the value of cash holdings only for firms which operate in countries where shareholders are well protected from expropriation by managers and in countries where the institutional quality is high.     

The Relationship Between Corporate Social Responsibility and Earnings Management: An Exploratory Study

In this article, we explore the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and earnings management (EM). Our CSR index, using KLD data, incorporates information from the following issue areas: the community, corporate governance, diversity, the product, employee relations, the environment, and human rights. Results show that more socially responsible firms have higher quality accruals and less activity-based EM, both of which impact financial reporting quality.     

Is Corporate Responsibility Converging? A Comparison of Corporate Responsibility Reporting in the USA, UK, Australia, and Germany

Corporate social reporting, while not mandatory in most countries, has been adopted by many large companies around the world and there are now a variety of competing global standards for non-financial reporting, such as the Global Reporting Initiative and the UN Global Compact. However, while some companies (e.g., Henkel, BHP, Johnson and Johnson) have a long standing tradition in reporting non-financial information, other companies provide only limited information, or in some cases, no information at all. Previous studies have suggested that there are, country and industry-specific, differences in the extent of CSR reports (e.g., Kolk et al.: 2001, Business Strategy and the Environment 10, 15–28; Kolk: 2005, Management International Review 45, 145–166; Maignan and Ralston: 2002, Journal of International Business Studies 33(3), 497–514). However, findings are inconclusive or contradictory and it is often difficult to compare previous studies owing to the idiosyncratic methods used in each study (Graafland et al.: 2004, Journal of Business Ethics 53, 137–152). Furthermore, previous studies have relied mainly on simple measures, such as word counts and page counts of reports, to compare the extent of reporting that may not capture significant differences in the content of the reports. In this article, we seek to overcome some of these deficiencies by using textual analysis software and a more robust statistical method to more objectively and reliably compare the CSR reports of firms in different industries and countries. We examine a sample of leading companies in four countries (US, UK, Australia, and Germany) and test whether or not membership of the Global Compact makes a difference to CSR reporting and is overcoming industry and country specific factors that limit standardization. We conclude that GlobalCompact membership is having an effect only in certain areas of CSR reporting, related to the environment and workers, and that businesses from different countries vary significantly in the extent to which they promote CSR and the CSR issues that they choose to emphasize in their reports. These country differences are argued to be related to the different institutional arrangements in each country.     

Financial Information Credibility,Legal Environment,and SMEs’ Access to Finance

Abstract

There remains academic debate on the association between credible financial information and small firms’ access to diversified sources of finance. This study investigates the role of credible financial information and its interaction with a country’s legal and regulatory environment on the access of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to diversified sources of finance in 129 developing countries. The findings indicate positive impacts of financial information quality and a country’s legal and regulatory environment on small firms’ access to diversified sources of finance. SMEs operating in a weak legal and regulatory environment benefit more from providing credible financial information. The findings are robust after controlling for the endogeneity of firms audit decision using a two-stage instrumental variable method. Our evidence suggests that firms’ credible signaling of the quality of their financial information helps reduce the adverse selection problem for finance suppliers, increasing small firms’ access to diversified sources of finance.     

Is Corporate Responsibility Converging? A Comparison of Corporate Responsibility Reporting in the USA,UK, Australia,and Germany

Corporate social reporting, while not mandatory in most countries, has been adopted by many large companies around the world and there are now a variety of competing global standards for non-financial reporting, such as the Global Reporting Initiative and the UN Global Compact. However, while some companies (e.g., Henkel, BHP, Johnson and Johnson) have a long standing tradition in reporting non-financial information, other companies provide only limited information, or in some cases, no information at all. Previous studies have suggested that there are, country and industry-specific, differences in the extent of CSR reports (e.g., Kolk et al.: 2001, Business Strategy and the Environment 10, 15–28; Kolk: 2005, Management International Review 45, 145–166; Maignan and Ralston: 2002, Journal of International Business Studies 33(3), 497–514). However, findings are inconclusive or contradictory and it is often difficult to compare previous studies owing to the idiosyncratic methods used in each study (Graafland et al.: 2004, Journal of Business Ethics 53, 137–152). Furthermore, previous studies have relied mainly on simple measures, such as word counts and page counts of reports, to compare the extent of reporting that may not capture significant differences in the content of the reports. In this article, we seek to overcome some of these deficiencies by using textual analysis software and a more robust statistical method to more objectively and reliably compare the CSR reports of firms in different industries and countries. We examine a sample of leading companies in four countries (US, UK, Australia, and Germany) and test whether or not membership of the Global Compact makes a difference to CSR reporting and is overcoming industry and country specific factors that limit standardization. We conclude that GlobalCompact membership is having an effect only in certain areas of CSR reporting, related to the environment and workers, and that businesses from different countries vary significantly in the extent to which they promote CSR and the CSR issues that they choose to emphasize in their reports. These country differences are argued to be related to the different institutional arrangements in each country.     

The hunt for international legitimacy: Examining the relationship between internationalization,state ownership,location and CSR reporting of Russian firms

This paper explores the relationship between internationalization and corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication in Russian firms. Our baseline argument is that internationalization positively affects CSR reporting, as it is expected to enhance the legitimacy of Russian firms abroad. We examine the role of state ownership, and Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) vs. non-CIS location, as two boundary conditions on the relationship between internationalization and CSR reporting. We test our hypotheses on panel data of 223 large Russian firms for the period 2012–2017, collected from company annual reports, databases, and official company websites. Our data include financial and non-financial indicators, and firm-level organizational characteristics. The results reveal the context specificity of CSR reporting. We find that state ownership moderates the relationship between internationalization and CSR reporting in CIS and non-CIS markets differently, and the positive effect is stronger for non-CIS locations. Our study goes beyond the traditional approach, treating CSR reporting as a unidimensional construct. We show that the effect of internationalization, both direct and moderated, differs for the different types of CSR activity.