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Academic literature and the business press have placed increased attention on the corporate disclosure of nonfinancial information. This study uses a survey of 750 retail investors to examine perceptions about indicators of economic performance, corporate governance policies and performance, and corporate social responsibility. Survey results indicate that retail investors currently are most concerned with economic performance information, followed by governance, and then corporate social responsibility information. Those respondents who currently hold socially responsible investments use more of all three types of nonfinancial information than respondents who currently do not hold socially responsible investments. Further, retail investors clearly prefer to obtain information about corporate social responsibility information from a third-party source and governance information from an audited or regulated document, while they use both sources to garner information about indicators of economic performance. Respondents expressed an interest in increasing their use of nonfinancial information in the future. When respondents were asked to indicate the specific types of information they had the greatest interest in using in the future, economic performance indicators such as market share, customer satisfaction, and product innovation information were predominant.

corporate disclosure, non-financial information, corporate social responsibility reporting, content analysis,

SYNOPSIS The call for disclosure of nonfinancial information has grown in response to the awareness that financial statements omit salient information about the company (Adams et al. 2011). This study follows earlier studies of nonfinancial disclosures of governance and corporate social responsibility information (Holder-Webb et al. 2008, 2009) and examines the public voluntary disclosure of a set of leading indicators of economic performance and sustainability of earnings provided during 2004 by a sample of 50 publicly traded firms across five industries. The results indicate that, among the sample firms, there remains a lack of rigorous and expansive disclosure of this type of information and that considerable variability exists in disclosure practice based on both industry and size. For example, companies disclose a wide variety of nonfinancial information both through mandatory filings such as 10-Ks and through alternative sources such as investor promotion materials and company websites, with the most frequent types of disclosures being concerned with information pertaining to market share and innovation. We conclude by discussing the role of this study within recent developments in integrative reporting (Adams et al. 2011) and suggest that these types of disclosures would benefit from the availability of assurance services. Data Availability: All information used in this paper is available from public sources.

Regulatory responses to the business failures of 1998-2001 framed them as a general failure of governance and ethics rather than as firm-specific problems. Among the regulatory responses are Section 406 of Sarbanes-Oxley Act, SEC, and exchange requirements to provide a Code of Ethics. However, institutional pressures surrounding this regulation suggest the potential for symbolic responses and decoupling of response from organizational action. In this article, we examine Codes of Ethics for a stratified sample of 75 U.S. firms across five distinct industries and find that content and language converge across organizations in ways undesired by the regulators, and that language is used to minimize the effects of the Code on constraining organizational behavior. There is, however, a noteworthy exception in the sections of the Codes dedicated the ethics of financial reporting. Although this material still contains legalistic boilerplate information, it does offer concrete guidance and emphatic language pertaining to the need to maintain the integrity of reporting practices. This suggests that the corporate understanding of the source of the failures is one of fraudulent financial reporting. Aside from the matter of financial reporting, the vague and stylized content of the Codes was a predicted response and constitutes a rational response to the regulation. The regulation, however, clearly states the belief that Codes should vary from firm to firm and that individual firms should determine the specific content of a Code. Aside from financial reporting matters, the observed result suggests that regulatory efforts may have failed to instigate corporate change in attitudes toward and enforcement of higher ethical standards by corporate actors.

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Academics, regulators, and the general business community have called for the assessment of the decision-usefulness of three key categories of nonfinancial information: economic, governance, and corporate social responsibility (CSR). This study builds on prior research by examining the nonfinancial information preferences of professional investors, how their demand for the nonfinancial information categories compares to those of nonprofessional investors, and whether these demands vary across subgroups of professional investors. Based on survey responses from 228 professional investors, the results show that this investor class prefers nonfinancial information that is concise, comprehensive, comparable, and credible. Similar to prior research, the results indicate that professional and nonprofessional investors have similar demand orderings: they are most interested in economic information, then governance information, and then CSR information. However, professional investors demand greater detail than do nonprofessional investors for subcategories of economic and governance information. Further, while both professional and nonprofessional investors' demand is increasing for all subcategories of governance and CSR information, the change in demand is more pronounced for nonprofessional relative to professional investors, and particularly for CSR information subcategories. These variations in preferences suggest potential differences in perspectives between professional and nonprofessional investors. Finally, the findings indicate that institutional investors have recently used less economic information. For the subgroups whose investment research consists of at least a quarter of socially responsible investments (SRI), the higher the SRI investor level, the higher the recent usage of more information categories; and the higher the SRI investor level, the higher the future demand for economic information, but the lower the SRI investor level, and the higher the demand for CSR information. These findings suggest potential differences in investment approaches among subgroups of professional investors. Together, these results provide support for more integrated reporting of nonfinancial information to meet professional investors' multidimensional preferences and differences in demand relative to those of nonprofessional investors.

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