“…Independent assurance on sustainability reports, and in particular on the CSP information disclosed, may increase stakeholders' confidence in companies' integrity regarding their accountability for their CSP, thus enhancing their corporate reputation (Simnett et al, 2009;Hahn & Kühnen, 2013;Casey & Grenier, 2015). Enhanced stakeholder confidence in the credibility of the CSP information disclosed may also result in competitive advantages, such as better access to finance (Cheng et al, 2014), a reduced cost of equity capital (Dhaliwal et al, 2011), increased analyst coverage, lower analyst forecast errors and dispersion, a reduction of monitoring costs (Dhaliwal et al, 2012;Casey & Grenier, 2015), and higher future cash flows (Lys et al, 2015;Plumlee et al, 2015).…”