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This study aims to investigate the relationship between corporate sustainable development goals (SDGs) disclosure and analyst forecast quality.

The study focuses on a sample of 95 Italian-listed companies preparing the mandatory non-financial declaration (NFD) according to the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) standards over a five-year period (2017–2021), corresponding to an unbalanced sample of 438 observations. Analyst forecast quality was proxied by earnings forecast accuracy (FA) and earnings forecast dispersion (FD), built on data retrieved from the Refinitiv database. A manual content analysis was performed on NFDs to derive an SDG disclosure score (SDGD) for each sampled company.

This study provides empirical evidence suggesting that voluntary SDG disclosure matters to the capital market in that it helps enhance the information environment of companies, evidenced by improved analyst forecast quality. In particular, this study highlighted that SDG disclosure positively influences analyst FA while negatively affecting analyst FD.

This study focuses on the Italian context, which has idiosyncratic characteristics regarding the structure of the financial market, the composition of corporate ownership and experience in non-financial reporting practices.

This study indicates to corporate managers that following GRI standards may represent the right way to better integrate SDG disclosure in corporate non-financial reports and increase the relevance of such information for investors and other capital market participants.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that empirically examines the association between SDG disclosure and analyst forecast quality.

The aim of this paper is to document the effect of analyst coverage on the ex ante probability of stock price crash and the ex ante probability stock price jump.

This paper uses the data of non-financial firms from France to test the arguments presented in this paper during the period between 1997 and 2019. The paper also uses flexible quadrants copulas to compute the ex ante probabilities of crashes and jumps.

The results show that the extent of analyst coverage is positively associated with the ex ante probability of crash and negatively associated with the ex ante probability of jump. The results remain qualitatively the same after several sensitivity checks. The results also show that the relationship between the extent of analyst coverage and the probability of cash and the probability of jump holds when ex post probability of stock price crash and stock price jump is used.

Unlike most of the earlier papers on this topic, this paper uses the ex ante probability of crash and jump. This proxy is better suited than the ones used in the prior literature because it is a forward-looking measure.

This study examines whether a firm’s management earnings forecasts affect its technical innovation activities. Our study also examines whether the cost of debt plays a mediating role between the management earnings forecasts and the innovation nexus.

We obtained data from 1,032 Chinese non-financial firms listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets from 2005 to 2022 (i.e. 18,576 firm-year observations). We used various econometrics techniques, such as Heckman’s (1979) two-stage selection method and two-stage least square, to examine the relationship between management earnings forecasts and the firm’s technical innovation activities.

We find a positive relationship between management earnings forecasts and the firms' technical innovation. We also find that the cost of debt mediates the relationship between management earnings forecast and technical innovation. Further analysis indicates that frequent earnings forecasts provide incremental information regarding a firm’s future value and cash flows, thus reducing the volatility and uncertainty in cash flow calculations. Our findings are robust to several tests.

Our study has implications for policymakers, practitioners and high-level management of Chinese firms, enabling them to understand the relationship between management earnings forecasts and firms' innovation activities.

The purpose of this paper is to test if building reputation capital through environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing can mitigate the negative effect of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on firms’ valuation.

This study uses an unbalanced panel of 591 financial firms between 2005 and 2021 from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom (UK) and the USA. Ordinary least square method is used in the empirical tests. To alleviate a potential endogeneity problem, robustness tests are performed using the two-stage least square approach with instrumental variables.

The results of this paper show that sustainable reporting can offset the negative effect of EPU on the valuation of financial firms. Consistent with the stakeholder-based reputation-building hypothesis, sustainability performance may have an insurance-like impact on firms’ valuation during periods of high uncertainty.

According to the findings, during high policy uncertainty periods, investors accept to pay a premium for the stocks of the firms which built social capital through environmental and social investments. Accordingly, it is suggested that regulatory bodies and governments motivate firms to increase their stakeholder orientation to attain higher reputation capital.

Managers can mitigate the negative impact of policy uncertainty on the value of their firms via building social capital, which will increase financial market stability in return, and portfolio investors may use such firms for portfolio optimization decisions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is one of the first to examine the mitigating role of ESG investing on EPU and firm valuation relationships for financial firms. Thus, this study provides new insights related to the impact of ESG performance on valuation during uncertain times.

Open innovation (OI), by now one of the major concepts for the analysis of innovation, is seen as a methodology for collaboratively designing and implementing solutions by engaging stakeholders in an iterative and inclusive service design process. This paper aims to empirically investigate OI capacities, defined as a cooperative, knowledge-sharing innovation ecosystem, and to explore how it can lead to improved performance of firms in Central and Eastern European (CEE) and Southeastern European (SEE) countries.

The study builds on the World Bank/European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD’s) Business Environment Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) dataset for 2009, 2013 and 2019. Primarily, the research model was estimated using log-transformed ordinary least squares (OLS). Taking into consideration that this method might produce substantial bias, yielding misleading inferences, this study is fitting Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood estimators with robust standard errors and instrumental variable/generalized method of moments estimation (IV/GMM) approach for comparative results. Secondarily, the research model was tested using structural equation modelling (SEM) to investigate the relationship between five OI capacities and firm performance.

The findings indicate that there is a significant positive relationship between most OI capacities and firm performance, except for innovation, which did not show a statistically significant relationship with firm performance. Specifically, research and development (R&D), knowledge and coopetition are statistically significant and positively associated with firm performance, whereas transformation is statistically significant but negatively associated with firm performance. The IV/GMM estimations’ findings support the view that the firm performance is significantly affected by OI capacities, together with some control variables such as size, age, foreign ownership and year dummy to have a significant impact on firm performance.

This paper fills an identified gap in the literature by investigating the impact of OI on firm performance executed in the specific CEE and SEE country context.

Unlike other types of corporate disclosure, corporate political disclosure (CPD), which is the disclosure of corporate political contributions and the related governing policies and oversight mechanisms, does not provide completely new information to stakeholders. Some of the information disclosed in CPD is available from other public records (e.g. the Federal Election Committee website or OpenSecrets website). Given this unique feature of CPD, it is interesting to investigate the cost and benefit tradeoff for firms of altering their CPD practice in response to policy and political uncertainty.

This study employs recently developed indexes of aggregate economic policy uncertainty (EPU) and a novel dataset of CPD transparency to examine the impact of EPU on CPD transparency and how the proprietary cost of corporate political activities moderates this association. The sample consists of S&P 500 companies from the 2012 to 2019 period.

The authors document that firms mitigate the heightened information asymmetry associated with higher aggregate EPU by increasing CPD transparency. The positive association between EPU and CPD is less pronounced for firms that are more sensitive to EPU, for firms that more actively manage EPU through corporate political contributions or lobbying activities and for firms that are followed by more analysts. The authors also find that more transparent CPD helps to mitigate the information asymmetry caused by heightened EPU. This study’s results hold when the authors control for other types of voluntary corporate disclosure.

This study contributes to the emerging literature on the determinants of CPD transparency by identifying EPU's positive impact on CPD transparency. This study also provides empirical evidence that the proprietary costs arising from the controversial nature of corporate political activities dampen firms' incentives to provide transparent CPD in response to heightened EPU, and that information on corporate political activities gathered and processed by financial analysts seems to lower the marginal benefit to companies of publicizing CPD on their own website.

Corporate disclosures are essential because they provide transparent and accurate information about a company's financial health, performance, risks and governance practices. They enable investors to make informed decisions, promote market efficiency and maintain trust in the financial system. This paper uses bibliometrics to identify the intellectual composition of the literature on corporate disclosure.

Based on the bibliometric information of 4,551 articles on corporate disclosure research, the authors conducted citation, keyword co-occurrence, bibliographic coupling and publication analyses to elucidate the leading articles, authors, sources, institutions, countries, themes and topics in the field of corporate disclosure from the 1960s to 2021.

The findings of this review demonstrate that corporate disclosure research is based on four broad themes – the role of disclosure in capital markets, non-financial disclosure, determinants of corporate disclosure and firm risk and intellectual capital disclosure. This review suggests that management should pay attention to the financial and non-financial corporate information that investors, regulators and the government emphasise.

This paper is the first comprehensive bibliometric review on corporate disclosure. It summarises the regulatory shifts, technological changes and industry trends that have influenced corporate disclosure research. Besides identifying broad research themes, the authors performed bibliographic coupling for research on disclosure sources, including annual reports, management forecasts, earnings calls, press releases, the Internet and social media, to reveal the thematic clusters related to these sources.

The worldwide imposition of lockdown measures to control the 2020 coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak has shifted most executive communications with external stakeholders online, resulting in quick responses from stakeholders. This study aims to understand how presentational styles exhibited in online communication induce immediate audience responses and empirically test the effectiveness of reactive impression management tactics.

The authors analyze presentational styles using MP3 files containing executive utterances during earnings call conferences held by S&P 100-listed firms after June 2020, the quarter after the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Using timestamps, the authors link each utterance to a 1-minute interval change in the ask/bid prices of the stocks that occurs a minute after the corresponding utterance begins.

Exhibiting an informational presentation style in earnings calls leads to positive and immediate audience responses. Managers tend to increase their reliance on promotional presentation styles rather than on informational ones when quarterly earnings exceed market forecasts.

Drawing on organizational genre theory, this research identifies the discrepancy between the presentation styles that audiences positively respond to and those that managers tend to exhibit in earnings calls and provides a reactive impression management typology for immediate responses from online audiences.

This study examines whether country-level financial integration affects firms' accounting choices and the quality of financial information.

This study employs Propensity Score Matching (PSM), and panel regressions of a large sample of data from 20 emerging markets over the period 1987–2018.

This study finds evidence that increased level of financial integration is significantly positively associated with firms' accruals earnings management (AEM) and real earnings management (REM).

Findings in the study have implications for standard-setting bodies that aim to enhance the usefulness of financial reporting quality. The study also has implications for various initiatives by governments in emerging markets aimed at raising investor confidence and fostering stock market development through greater financial integration.

Findings in the study have implications for standard-setting bodies that aim to enhance the usefulness and quality of financial reporting. The findings can be of interest to analysts, auditors and other monitoring institutions who play a crucial role in detecting earnings management and reducing information asymmetry. Finally, the study has implications for various initiatives by governments in emerging markets aimed at raising investor confidence and fostering stock market development through greater financial integration.

Findings in the study reveal how country-level financial integration affects accruals and real earnings management in a sample of firms from 20 emerging markets. Further, the study adds to the growing body of literature on emerging markets where capital markets mechanisms, regulatory environment and firm's corporate governance are distinct to developed markets.

Corporate site visits increase labor investment efficiency.

Our empirical model for the baseline analysis follows those of Jung et al. (2014) and Ghaly et al. (2020).

We show that corporate site visits are associated with significantly higher labor investment efficiency; more specifically, site visits reduce both over-hiring and under-hiring of employees. The effect of site visits on labor investment efficiency is more pronounced for firms with higher labor adjustment costs, greater financial constraints, weaker corporate governance and lower financial reporting quality. We also find that site visits mitigate labor cost stickiness.

First, while the literature has suggested how the presence of institutional investors and analysts may affect labor investment decisions, we focus on institutional investors and analysts’ activities and interactions with firm executives. We provide direct evidence that institutional investors and analysts may use corporate site visits to improve labor investment efficiency. Second, our study adds to a line of recent studies on how corporate site visits reduce information asymmetry and agency conflicts. We show that corporate site visits allow institutional investors and analysts to influence labor investment efficiency. We also provide new evidence that corporate site visits reduce labor cost stickiness.