The amount of literature on IR has grown over the last few years, but while particular attention has been paid to the variables that can play a role in IR adoption, IR quality and its determinants are still the subject of debate. The main determinants of IR quality outlined by the literature are firm size, industry, national context, firm performance, assurance, and to a lesser extent, corporate governance and company ownership structure. However, previous studies have usually reached conflicting results, thus not providing shared conclusions.This paper aims to understand the impact of the Board of Directors’ features on IR quality, evaluated in terms of the degree of compliance between IR content and the guidelines suggested in the IR framework presented by IIRC. The Board’s characteristics considered are size, composition and diversity with regard to board members’ gender, age and level of education.53 companies were taken into consideration from 2013 to 2016 for a total number of 212 integrated reports. Five research hypotheses were developed. Research findings highlight that IR quality is positively associated with the level of education of board members, and negatively with the presence of women. Moreover, among control variables, profitability (positive relation) and leverage (negative relation) are relevant determinants. Our research findings support the idea that the “quality” of the board members matters more than their “quantity” in increasing IR quality, and that diversity in the board is more relevant than diversity of the board.

The disclosure quality of Integrated Reporting (IR) and Sustainability Reporting (SR) is considered a relevant research topic because high‐quality disclosure is associated with a better representation of firms' performance and value creation process. However, only a few studies have addressed this topic and there is no clear knowledge as they have shown conflicting findings. In this paper, a systematic literature network analysis (SLNA) is applied to analyze the evolution of the research field on the topic of the disclosure quality of IR and SR. Findings show the actual state of the art on the quality of IR and SR disclosure and suggest new research trends. Moreover, this study applies a new methodology called SLNA to perform the analysis and it confirms its goodness as a method for dynamic analysis.

The current dramatic context of COVID-19 has urged academics and practitioners to tackle the topic of the pandemic not only regarding its medical side but from the perspective of social sciences, accounting and accountability as well. In this sense, our paper moves from the pivotal work of Higgins and Walker (2012) and Merkl-Davies and Brennan (2017) and tries to trace the use and the extent of accounting communication by companies during the peculiar context of the pandemic. Considering the nature of the elements to be evaluated, we applied a manual content analysis, a more suitable technique than software to capture subjective and emotional elements. Among the main preliminary results of the paper, the volume and the importance of emotional content come to the surface, such as self-assessment and emotional tone. The paper confirms the important role of rhetorical analysis in understanding the quality and the meaning of the information provided by companies and contributes to the stream of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) studies on corporate reporting.

Integrated reporting (IR) represents the last frontier of corporate disclosure and aims to include material financial and nonfinancial information in a single document. One of the main objectives of IR, in the idea conceived by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC), is to provide recipients with written information in a clear, understandable, and accessible way. In light of this goal, this study, using stakeholder theory, aims to examine the readability of integrated reports and the factors capable of affecting this level of readability. The analysis, conducted on a sample of 221 international companies that published an integrated report in 2020, shows a low level of readability of the integrated reports examined. Furthermore, it demonstrates a positive effect of firm size and financial leverage on the level of readability of the integrated reports, also highlighting a nonsignificant impact of firm profitability. Our results offer important contributions to theory and practice.

Gender equality is the future towards which society and companies have to move, and it is thus essential to know what efforts organisations are making. In this paper, we analyse the transparency of multinationals in matters of gender, in accordance with the requirements determined by the global reporting initiative (GRI) and United Nations (UN). The results suggest that higher levels of gender equality support the decision to report all GRI+UN indicators, a decision that has been maintained over time and is not moderated by peer disclosure. This behaviour facilitates the inclusion of companies in different reputation lists as a consequence of a greater commitment to gender equality, although these rankings also assess the completeness of the information when considering the disclosure of the GRI+UN indicators. The effect differs according to the practices of peer firms.