Over the last years, sustainable development has become one of the major issues that all global organizations are facing. The Global Reporting Initiative, located in the Netherlands and considered the leading authority world-wide, has developed what is currently considered the “common framework for sustainability reporting”. The latest version of their reporting guidelines called G3 contains detailed instructions and standards on how to prepare sustainability reports. By using G3 guidelines, corporations show a strong commitment of continuous improvement of their sustainability reporting practices. The G3 guidelines are increasingly adopted by many global corporations and organizations. At present, more than 700 organizations voluntarily publish a sustainability report according to G3 guidelines. For the first time, this empirical study investigates if the better performing and/or governed corporations prepare their sustainability reports according to the G3 guidelines. The goal of this study is to determine if there are significant differences with regard to size, financial performance, capital structure, and corporate governance between firms that publish a G3 sustainability report to those that don’t. Therefore, quantitative and qualitative variables of 124 randomly selected G3 reporting and non-G3 reporting corporations from 25 countries were analyzed. The results of this analysis show that corporations with the characteristics of being located in Europe, and/or being active in the energy or producing sector, and/or with a higher profit margin are more likely to produce high quality sustainability reports. Corporations with a higher long-term growth rate, on the other hand, are less likely to produce sustainability reports. The results of this unique study contribute directly to the knowledge of corporations providing voluntary CSR information in form of quality sustainability reports and the importance of the development of globally accepted sustainability reporting standards.

Integrated reporting is becoming increasingly popular. The focus of this study was to assess the overall integrated reporting quality of global companies and find determinants of high-level integrated reporting. Qualitative text analysis was performed on the 2017 integrated reports of 110 global organizations to determine in what way companies report on specific topics related to the six capitals: social and relationship, human, intellectual, manufacturing, natural, and financial. Using a novel assessment technique, scores were then assigned according to the details provided in the integrated reports on the various topics. This was done for each form of capital, and the total integrated score was subsequently calculated as the average between all the capital scores. Finally, a regression analysis was performed to determine the characteristics of high-quality integrated reporters. The results of univariate analysis and two-stage least squares instrumental variable (2SLS) regression indicate that companies of a larger size with a higher female board ratio and listing in the International Integrated Reporting Committee (IIRC) examples database are more likely to publish a higher quality integrated report. The results imply that these variables are the main disclosure drivers. However, a significant negative correlation was found between integrated report quality and the variables related to female executive ratio, external board member ratio, profitability, leverage, and previous report experience, as well as report length. No significant association was found between the location and industry group and report quality. The empirical evidence of this study shows that even though integrated reporting has become more common overall, the comparability and quality of the reports still remain low.

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This study empirically analyzes reporting on long-term value creation for Canadian public mining and energy companies. It represents an important first step in determining the quality of reporting and its determinants for large public companies. In this exploratory empirical study, a reporting quality scoring index was developed to measure disclosure quality of long-term value creation reporting. Content analysis was used to examine financial and sustainability reports for a sample of twenty Canadian public mining and energy companies. Corporate disclosure quality scores were then calculated by assessing the quality of reporting in four main categories. The findings suggest that overall disclosure quality on long-term value creation is still low. Companies disclosing higher quality information on long-term value creation are of bigger size, operate in the basic materials sector, have an independent board, are listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, experience higher stock volatility and use more words related to long-term value creation in their annual financial and non-financial reports. In order to increase and restore stakeholder trust and credibility as well as a tool to maintain stability, it is strongly recommended to introduce adequate mandatory standardization resulting in a set of internationally recognized reporting standards as well as a requirement for external assurance of reports.

A shareholder theory of firm and a stakeholder theory of firm may differ in their respective evaluation method of firm performance. Both theories however recognize the importance of value creation as the economic role of firms as institutions. The New Institutional Economics (NIE) emphasizes incentives alignment, while also viewing stakeholder engagements as methods to expand the boundaries of firms. The difference in performance evaluation between the two approaches can be reduced if stakeholders, while formulating incentive alignment, also evaluate the mechanisms of establishing a common currency value. The concomitant development of stakeholder engagement, incentive alignment, and value currency creation is argued to be an evolutionary process with the efficiency implications of the two theories tending to converge.