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This study aims to investigate the extent and trends of voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and to analyze the determinants of the listed banks’ annual reports and websites in an emergent capital market, namely, Tunisia.

The authors examine the level of CSR disclosure by means of a manual content analysis where the sentence is used as the unit of the analysis. They use Branco and Rodrigues’ (2006 and 2008) index which includes 23 items. They focus on the annual reports of 11 Tunisian listed banks during the period from 2007 to 2012 and the information presented on their websites in December 2013. They use, also, regression analysis to identify the determinants of CSR disclosure used by Tunisian listed banks.

The results of the investigation show that Tunisian listed banks disclose CSR information primarily in a narrative form. Human resources are the main focus in the annual reports, whereas, on the websites, community involvement is the most widespread theme. With regard to the determinants, it appears that bank age, financial performance and state shareholding are the main factors that impact CSR disclosure in the Tunisian listed banks’ annual reports. Furthermore, this study finds a positive (negative) relationship between leverage (financial performance) and CSR disclosure in the banks’ websites. In this regard, the results show different determinants of CSR disclosure for the two supports. Moreover, bank size, foreign shareholding and the type of auditor are unrelated to the listed banks’ CSR disclosure either in their annual reports or on their websites.

The sample size is small; however, it consists of all the relevant Tunisian banks. Also, this study is subject to the limitations of using manual content analysis.

This study enables highlights the importance of CSR disclosure and its determinants for the Tunisian banks’ stakeholders (such as regulators, investors and managers).

The authors contribute to the scarce literature on CSR disclosure in financial institutions. It is the first study to investigate Tunisian listed banks’ CSR disclosure. It is a first attempt to show, also, how banks’ characteristics and banks’ ownership structures impact on their CSR disclosure in their annual reports and on their websites.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the internet and annual reports as media of intellectual capital disclosure (ICD) and analyse its determinants.

The paper examines ICD on the internet in 2009 and compares the internet and 2008 annual reports as disclosure media using content analysis. Non‐parametric statistical methods are used to analyse some factors which influence disclosure.

Portuguese companies attribute greater importance to the internet. The analysis showed that size is significant in explaining ICD only in the case of annual reports. The results also indicated that industrial affiliation is only partially a factor explaining ICD.

The sample is small. There may be content analysis issues associated with subjectivity in the coding process and the use of a limited content analysis method.

The paper adds to the scarce research on ICD by Portuguese companies by providing new empirical data. This paper is one of the first to investigate ICD both in annual reports and on the internet.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the possible role of annual report readability in accrual anomaly, shedding light on why investors fail to incorporate accruals information in a timely and unbiased manner beyond the original naive investor fixation explanation.

Using five proxies of annual report readability and available data over 1993–2017, we investigate whether accrual overpricing is more severe when annual reports are less readable.

We find little (substantive) evidence of accrual overpricing among high (low) readability firms. The readability effects are contingent on the level of business complexity and earnings management.

This study extends the original naive investor fixation explanation and documents annual report complexity as a market friction in explaining the accrual anomaly, contributing to the mispricing vs risk debate and supporting the efficient market hypothesis.

Low readability of annual reports is a red flag to investors.

This study provides support for regulatory initiatives aimed at enhancing readability of corporate disclosures to address market frictions and improve market efficiency.

Accrual anomaly has posed a challenge to the efficient market hypothesis. This study draws on and adds to the line of research indicating that annual report complexity is a friction erecting a barrier to transparency, hindering market efficiency. This study contributes to our understanding of the enigmatic accrual anomaly.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the role and importance of the annual report as a source of information about public sector entities.

This research uses a survey methodology to access users of public sector annual reports and is innovative because it has directly studied actual users across the entire public sector.

The findings of this research indicate that the annual report is an important source of information about public sector entities but it is not the most important source of information. This study also found that the annual report is not regarded as equally important across all public sector entity types. Differences in the importance attached to the annual report by different stakeholder groups were also noted.

These findings have important implications for policy makers with respect to the information content of public sector annual reports. In particular the blanket approach to legislative requirements for annual reporting may need to be reviewed in view of the findings of this research that there are differing levels of importance attached to the annual report as an information source by users from different public sector entity types.

The research in this paper is original in that it has, systematically and directly accessed users of public sector annual reports to determine their information sources.

The purpose of this paper is to explore who uses narrative reporting information contained within online corporate annual reports and assess the relative use of different types of narrative information.

Web server logs were used to analyse over one million instances where information is successfully delivered to users of the corporate web sites of 15 FTSE 350 companies.

The most frequent users of the online annual report are, respectively, private individuals, those registered under internet service providers, employees and professional investors/creditors. The results suggest that those with greater experience and expertise in preparing and using financial accounts adopt different information preferences with respect to the online annual report. Although experienced users such as professional investors, creditors and accounting firms use the annual report to download predominantly detailed financial accounting data, the widespread availability and accessibility of the online annual report allows narratives to provide a source of general company information for employees and a wider stakeholder audience.

The paper presents the first large‐scale survey into the use and users of online annual reports.

This paper addresses the role of principles-based accounting standards as a potential mechanism for reducing firms' time delay of annual reporting disclosure while improving the timeliness of accounting information. The paper also contributes to the existing literature by addressing the mediating effects of the financial reporting complexity and the audit workload on the link between principles-based accounting standards and the time delay of annual reporting disclosure.

The focus is placed on an unbalanced panel of 20,943 samples over the period of 2007–2017.

The results show that the more principles-based the accounting standards are, the lower the time delay of annual reporting disclosure is, and the timelier the disclosure of accounting information is. The relationship between the two is more significant especially in the first two months after the end of the fiscal year. The findings are all robust after controlling for a series of sensitivity checks and endogenous concerns. From the mediating effect results, the authors find that principles-based accounting standards decrease the financial reporting complexity and the audit workload which in turn can help lower time delay of annual reporting disclosure. In addition, the negative effect of principles-based accounting standards on the time delay of annual reporting disclosure is more significant in the case that the company has “good news” including with no losses and receiving the standard auditing opinions. The results confirm the law of “good news announces early, bad news announces late.” Furthermore, the moderating effect results show that the higher the economic policy uncertainty index and the legal environment index, the lower the benefit of principles-based accounting standards to the timeliness of annual reports. The results of the economic consequences of timeliness suggest that the timely disclosure of accounting reporting will bring greater market reaction and contain more information, and the information of companies that disclose annual reports timely are more transparent.

This paper studies the impact of accounting standards on the timeliness of annual report disclosure, which enriches the literature in the field of macro policies and micro-enterprise behaviors.

The purpose of this study is to provide evidence on the category, quantity and quality of voluntary employee-related information Australian listed companies disclose in their annual report. An explanation is also sought to determine whether companies adopt employee-related disclosures to legitimise their relationship with society. Voluntary adoption of corporate governance best practice recommendations is used as a measure of companies' attempts to attain ex ante legitimacy. Media agenda setting theory is used as a measure of an attempt to gain legitimacy ex post following adverse publicity from the media.

The annual reports of all companies with at least one employee listed on the Australian Stock Exchange with a 30th June balance date of 2004 are examined to identify employee-related disclosures. This employee-related information is categorised and identified as positive, negative or a combination of positive and negative information by three independent coders. Ordinary least squares regression is used to explain the quantity of disclosure with a corporate governance score and number of adverse newspaper articles included as experimental variables.

Adopting voluntary corporate governance mechanisms is associated with the quantity of voluntary annual report employee-related disclosures. Higher levels of adverse publicity are also significantly associated with higher quantities of employee-related disclosures. The quality of these disclosures is questioned because 124 companies had adverse publicity relating to employees and only two of these companies reported any negative employee-related disclosures. Few companies from the whole sample reported any negative information relating to their employees in their annual report, with 98 per cent of companies reporting positive news or no news.

Most previous social responsibility research has focused on environmental disclosures. This study is original because it focuses on employee-related disclosures. Honest, transparent employee disclosures are an international corporate governance recommendation by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and studies have not previously tested the relation between reporting recommended corporate governance mechanisms and employee-related disclosures in annual reports.

The study explores the relationship between information overloading and the complexity of reporting. In particular, it investigates whether voluntary information in a firm annual report is associated with its readability. Likewise, it examines how a firm's profitability and earnings management practices impact the nexus of voluntary disclosure and readability.

It uses the annual reports of the Egyptian nonfinancial firms listed in the EGX 100 index from 2010 to 2018. The readability of the annual report is measured automatically using the LIX index, and a predeveloped voluntary disclosure index is used to measure the level of voluntary disclosure in the annual reports.

The results reveal that the readability of annual reports is a negative function of voluntary disclosure, suggesting that Egyptian firms with more voluntary disclosure are likely to have more complex (i.e. less readable) annual reports. Likewise, less profitable firms and firms with earning management practices increase voluntary information in their annual reports, resulting in an adverse impact on their reporting readability.

It focuses only on the annual reports of Egyptian firms and considers a firm’s overall voluntary information rather than a particular area of voluntary disclosure. It introduces a code to measure the readability of Arabic-written texts, which can be applied to different areas of disclosure.

Policymakers in Egypt are encouraged to develop enforceable regulations to control voluntary disclosure in annual reports. Egyptian investors should view the practice of higher voluntary disclosure skeptically as its aim may be to divert attention from a firm's poor performance and earnings management practice.

The study is the first evidence from Egypt on the effect of information overloading, proxied by voluntary disclosure, on the readability of reporting. Likewise, it contributes to methodological development in measuring the readability of Arabic-written annual reports.

In a capitalist system, an annual report that includes financial statement is assumed to provide sound information concerning a given company. The annual report offers a background to a company, its financial position, operational results, and its performance. According to radical economics, a financial statement serves the interests of capitalists (Belkaoui, 1984). Annual reports are also value free and are not concerned with issues such as justice or ethics. Indeed, current trends in accounting have raised some questions concerning the paradigm of traditional accounting theory and especially its bias its bias concerning capitalist interests. The emergence of Employee Reporting, Value Added Accounting, Socio‐Economic Accounting, and Environmental Accounting, to name just a few, is evidences of the shortcomings of the capitalistic accounting system in establishing both just and fair principles among company stakeholders. This has therefore led to a demand for a new approach towards accounting disclosure including among others things: a clear account of how a company treats its employees, society, the environment, and the beliefs of employee’s. Even tough the standard formulated by AAOIFI (1998) based on capitalistic accounting, are still in a theoretical stage of development they can be used as a starting point that may help lead to an improved set of disclosure criteria that can be used by an Islamic bank or organization. This paper will discuss the empirical evidence derived from one such Islamic organization. Bank Muamalat Indonesia, has compiled information using capitalistic accounting standards so as to clarify its financial position and results of operations to stakeholders. It is hypothesized though, that the current disclosure system employed gives no indication of justness or fairness and so is incompatible with Islamic value. The paper argues Muslim researcher sold aim to move from utilizing capitalistic practice primarily concerned with the disclosure of financial indicators and towards a system that also consider justice, fairness, and ethical practices.

Human capital is considered by many to be a firm's most important asset. However, because no international human capital reporting framework exists, firms can decide to include/exclude human capital details on annual reports. Based on legitimacy theory, firms that disclose high levels of human capital information can be considered congruent with the expectations of society. However, firms can also choose to include human capital information on annual reports for symbolic purposes as an image management strategy.

Using 2018 as a sample period, content analysis is used to evaluate the annual reports of the 25 largest British and 25 largest Korean firms to demonstrate the propensity of British/Korean firms to disclose human capital information as numerical and textual data.

The authors report that South Korean firms provide high levels of human capital information using narrative and numerical data, including value added human capital elements included on integrated reports. British firms on the other hand tend to use primarily positive narrative and limited numerical human capital data to present human capital information.

The results imply South Korean firms provide robust human capital information on annual reports as a legitimacy strategy. On the other hand, the UK's human capital reporting requirement can be considered as a form of image management. The results therefore have important policy implications for legislators, labour unions and firm stakeholders with incentives to enhance human capital information transparency.