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Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting by large corporations has witnessed phenomenal growth over the last two decades. The voluntary nature of these disclosures, however, has led to inconsistencies in reporting formats, treatment, and inclusion of various contextual elements, and a lack of robust measures pertaining to the quality and accuracy of the reports' content. Efforts to address these drawbacks such as Global Reporting Initiative and ISO 26000 have proven unsatisfactory due to their primary emphasis on process for creating CSR reports without similar attention on measurement criteria to ensure robust implementation, or verify accuracy of information. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature. It uses a new framework-called the CSR-Sustainability Monitor Ò -of analyzing and evaluating the contents of CSR reports in a manner that allows for a single report to be compared with any other single group, and groups of reports based on industry, country-oforigin, and similar other groupings. Using data from the CSR reports of 614 large corporations worldwide, this study analyzes the character and scope of integrity assurance contained in these CSR reports. The analysis is further extended to explore some external factors that would explain variations in the assurance decision and the quality of integrity assurance in these reports.

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This study examines derivatives use of foreign exchange, interest rate, and commodities risk by nonfinancial firms across multiple industries, using data from 1995 to 2001. This work considers the interaction of a firm's risk exposures, derivatives use, and real operations simultaneously, We thank Robert Webb (the editor) and anonyomous referee for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions, and Nosa Omoregie for his valuable research assistance. We also benefited from discussions with Archishman Chakraborty, Ozgur Demirtas, Charlotte Hansen, Armen Hovakimian, Susan Ji, John Merrick, Salih Neftci, Lin Peng, Robert Schwartz, James Weston, and Liuren Wu. Turan Bali gratefully acknowledges the financial support from the PSC-CUNY Research Foundation of the City University of New York. All errors remain our responsibility.An earlier version of this paper was presented at Baruch College, the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York, and considers how these factors change over time using a consistent database. Hedging with derivatives is only significantly related to commodity risk exposure during most years of the study, and to a more limited degree to interest rate exposure. Further, a strong correlation was found between risk exposures for some years using a new technique, suggesting that univariate modeling is not always appropriate. The implications are that hedging with derivatives is not always important to a firm's rate of return and is linked to other nonfinancial and economic factors.