Despite the increasing level of interest in CSR issues, it is not yet clear what real value the market assigns to social reporting. By applying the value relevance analysis to a sample of 130 European‐listed banks, the present work proposes a key to understanding the relationship between social reporting and the value that the market attributes to banks that publicize their commitment to CSR through social reporting. The analysis for the entire sample does not provide evidence that investors attribute value relevance to social reporting (i.e. there is not a significant correlation between the publication of a social report and the stock price). Cross‐country analysis shows that in some countries the social report is value‐relevant, and positively affects the stock price; in others it remains value‐relevant but negatively affects the stock price. Our findings could have several implications for banks, investors, and policymakers. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Applying value relevance analysis to a sample of European banks, we test the following: (i) the direct effects of the sustainability report on stock price; (ii) whether the report modifies the value relevance of financial accounting variables (indirect effects); and (iii) whether the value relevance of sustainability reports varies across countries. Results show that investors appreciate the additional and complementary disclosure provided by the sustainability report and that this disclosure produces a positive effect on stock prices. Estimates of the indirect effects demonstrate that it has a negative influence on book value per share, whereas the effect on earnings per share is not significant. Cross-country analysis shows that the value relevance of the sustainability report varies across European countries, consistent with the hypothesis that the value relevance of the sustainability report is likely to be influenced by different institutional contexts.

This study reviews all the academic contributions to research on social impact bonds (SIBs). It responds to the need for clarification across and within the various perspectives used in the literature. The goal was to assess the approaches used in extant studies and to offer directions for future studies. A bibliometric analysis was performed, and a framework was developed in which the contributions were positioned according to two criteria: (a) a distinction on the basis of research approaches and perspectives on SIBs and (b) an analysis of content according to a protocol that includes key questions corresponding with the most pressing issues in this area. K E Y W O R D S literature review, social impact bond, social impact finance 1 | INTRODUCTION The purpose of this study is to provide a systematic review of the academic literature on social impact bonds (SIBs). Since their introduction in the United Kingdom in 2010, SIBs have been receiving increasing attention from practitioners and scholars, as evidenced in the nuanced approaches and methods adopted for studying them as well as in the diverse research areas where SIBs have been addressed (Fraser, Tan, Lagarde, & Mays, 2018). To date, a review of SIBs focussed exclusively on academic papers is non-existent. Fraser et al.'s (2018) review included both academic (38 papers) and "grey" literature products (63 papers) from 2009 to 2015. They distinguished the "cautionary narrative" (mainly related to the academic literature) and two other narratives (mainly related to the grey literature) that assumed a pragmatic and ideological perspective of SIBs. At present, SIBs have broadened both in terms of adoption and research interest: This could allow academics to develop both theoretical and empirical analyses. Therefore, exclusive focus on academic contributions is timely because it is possible to reconstruct a scholarly assessment of SIB implementations, theoretical so-far developing arguments, and open issues. The review's strategy was twofold. First, a bibliometric analysis was conducted to explore (a) the evolution of SIBs in the literature; (b) the existence of central contributors and institutions devoted to work on SIBs; (c) disciplinary areas (research categories) that have shown interest in the discourse of SIBs; and (d) the visibility of contributions as measured through their positioning in ranked journals. Second, to develop a framework, academic contributions to SIBs were analysed and positioned according to two criteria: (a) a distinction based on research approaches to and perspectives on SIBs and (b) an analysis of content according to a protocol that includes key questions corresponding to SIBs' most pressing issues as individuated by the Government Outcomes Lab, a centre of academic research and practice for outcome-based contracting and SIBs at the University of Oxford. The current paper makes two contributions. First, it provides a critical analysis of academic contributions that point out directions and frameworks for extant research and future r...

The mixed results of previous empirical investigations on the relevance of firms' reporting on sustainable development could be due to the absence of a theoretical paradigm able to capture the differences across countries. We apply the varieties of capitalism approach on a sample of European listed banks from 2005 to 2011, to evaluate whether the different institutional contexts affect the value relevance of sustainability reporting in European stock markets. The results show that sustainability reporting is more relevant in coordinated market economies compared with liberal market economies and mixed market economies. The main findings are that systemic and institutional factors influence the impact of sustainability reporting on the firm's market value, and the varieties of capitalism approach provides an important theoretical framework to grasp and highlight differences across European countries on the value relevance of firms' reporting on sustainable development. Copyright

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