No abstract

Building upon impression management, the objective of this paper is to analyse the enhancement or obfuscation strategies of reporting corporate social responsibility (CSR) information. Concretely, this paper aims to examine the association between the CSR performance of the firm and the socially responsible disclosure strategy adopted by managers to obtain insights into the factors associated with balance, accuracy, clarity, comparability, and reliability of information. A sample of 273 international companies from the year 2007 to 2014 was used to develop our models of analysis. The results show that, according to an obfuscation disclosure strategy, firms with the worst CSR performance disclose information that is less balanced, accurate, and clear; moreover, these reports incorporate more optimistic, longer, and less readable information. Within the realm of impression-management strategy, firms use thematic content and verbal tone manipulation as well as quantity and syntactical reading as impression-management tools.

As the person responsible for a company's strategies and disclosure policies, the CEO is the architect of its CSR strategy. This paper analyzes which CEO's attributes influence the level of disclosure of information about business contribution to the SDGs.Based on the Upper Echelons Theory, a set of hypotheses on the influence of several CEO attributes (demographic and professional characteristics as well as personal traits) on SDGs disclosure have been tested in a sample of the leading Spanish companies for the period 2015-2021 using ordinal regressions for panel data. The results show that education level, nationality, and narcissism are the CEO attributes that significantly affect the level of SDG disclosure. Specifically, companies whose CEOs have a higher level of education, are Spanish (local), and are narcissist tend to disclose more information about the SDGs. This study aims to contribute to literature by providing new empirical evidence on an emerging research topic and by providing a glimpse into the CEO "profile" that may favor a company's propensity to disclose information on the SDGs.