Empirical Analysis of Non-Financial Reporting by Spanish Companies

Abstract

Spain is one of the European countries that is the most strongly committed to the presentation of non-financial information. In 2017, Spain adapted its legislation to Directive 2014/95/EU through Royal Decree-Law 18/2017, which required Public Interest Entities (PIEs) to provide information in accordance with the requirements of the European Union (EU) Directive, with respect to financial years from 1 January 2017. Our research is focused on Spanish IBEX-351 listed companies and seeks to identify current trends in non-financial reporting. To our knowledge, the present paper is the first study to examine the impact made in Spain by the legislative changes. Our aim is to analyse the publication of non-financial information by Spanish listed companies whose first reports in this regard were made from early 2018. Specifically, we consider the impact of this information disclosure, determining whether the companies in question restrict themselves to meeting regulatory requirements or whether they go further and voluntarily supply additional information. Our findings show that the level of regulatory compliance produced is associated with the business sector in which the company operates. We also show that the highest rates of disclosure of non-financial information correspond to companies that provide this information in the sustainability report.

Encompassing Non-Financial Reporting in A Coercive Framework for Enhancing Social Responsibility: Romanian Listed Companies’ Case

“…The significance of the results is validated by the R square coefficient value and the analysis of variance performed using the ANOVA test, which reveals each relationship's strength. Thus, the company's size has the strongest influence, followed by its performance and the sensitivity of the industry to which they belong, thus being in line with prior evidence (Duran and Rodrigo, 2018;Sierra-Garcia et al, 2018;Szadziewska et al, 2018;Galant and Cerne, 2017). Moreover, we also tested the robustness of the proposed model.…”

“…In the second stage, for performing the regression analysis aimed to identify possible factors influencing transparency enacted through the EUD (RQ2), we selected the potential determinants of the NFI disclosure (dependent variable) according to prior studies conducted on a similar topic. Among the most analyzed factors influencing there are the company size (measured by the number of employees, total assets or market capitalization), profitability (measured by ROA/ROE), financial leverage, Tobin's Q, business sector, assurance, type of reporting (Szadziewska et al, 2018;Sierra-Garcia et al, 2018;Duran and Rodrigo, 2018;Venturelli et al, 2017;Galant and Cerne, 2017). A summary of the independent variables considered in this research comprising their definition, proxies and reference authors is presented in table no.…”

“…Thus, most researchers conducted an ex-ante analysis of the non-financial reporting and its determinants (Carini et al, 2018;Szadziewska et al, 2018;Dumitru et al, 2017;Galant and Cerne, 2017), while there are few ex-post evidences (Sierra-Garcia et al, 2018;Venturelli et al, 2017;Matuszak and Rozanska, 2017). For example, the quality of CSR disclosure in Polish-listed Companies in the light of EUD requirements (Matuszak and Rozanska, 2017), the compliance to the EU Guidelines 2017/C215/01 with the IIRF and the GRI 4 guidelines on the European companies (Manes-Rossi et al, 2018), the level of non-financial and diversity disclosure and the transposition of the EUD into Italian law (Venturelli et al, 2017) or the level of completeness of NFI and the expected impact of the EUD in oil and gas sector (Carini et al, 2018) and the clarity of reports published by organizations (containing elements related to bioeconomy) in Europe (Avram et al, 2018).…”

“…Szadziewska et al (2018);Sierra-Garcia et al (2018);Duran and Rodrigo (2018);Galant and Cerne (2017) EMPLThe natural logarithm of the total number of employees at the end of the fiscal yearVenturelli et al (2017); Galant and Cerne (-The ratio of the annual net income to the total assets at the year's endSzadziewska et al (2018);Duran and Rodrigo (2018);Galant and Cerne (2017) ROE Return on equity -The ratio of the annual net income to the stockholders' equity at the end…”

Integrated Reporting and European State-Owned Enterprises: A Disclosure Analysis Pre and Post 2014/95/EU

“…To this extent, a broad range of contributions has been observed. On a national level, Sierra-Garcia et al [29] investigated the application of the EUD in the case of Spanish companies, and Tiron-Tudor et al [30] analysed the change brought by the EUD on non-financial information by Romanian listed companies, for the year previous and after the entry into force of the regulation. Moreover, Venturelli et al [6] analysed the readiness of large, Italian organisations' reports for the upcoming EUD, while Doni et al [31] explored the quality of non-financial reports in relation to compliance toward the EUD, in the case of Italian companies foreseen by the entrance into force of the Directive.…”