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This paper examines the gap between reporting and managers’ behaviour to challenge the current theoretical underpinnings of intellectual capital (IC) disclosure practice and research. The authors explore how the key features from IC and integrated reporting can be combined to develop an extended model for companies to comply with EU Directive 2014/95/EU and increase trust in corporate disclosures and reports.

This essay relies on academic literature and examples from practice to critique the theories that explain corporate disclosure and reporting but do not change management behaviour. Based on this critique, the authors argue for a change in the fundamental theories of stewardship to frame a new concept for corporate disclosure incorporating using a multi-capitals framework.

We argue that, while the inconsistency between organisations’ reporting and behaviour persists, increasing, renewing or extending the information disclosed is not enough to instil trust in corporations. Stewardship over a company’s resources is necessary for increasing trust. The unanticipated consequences of dishonest behaviour by managers and shareholders compels a new application of stewardship theory that works as an overarching guide for managerial behaviour and disclosure. Emanating from this new model is a realisation that managers must abandon agency theory in practice, and specifically the bonus contract.

We call for future empirical research to explore the role of stewardship theory within the dynamics of corporate disclosure using the approach. The research implications of those studies should incorporate the potential impacts on management behaviours within a stewardship framework and how those actions, and their outcomes, are disclosed for rebuilding public trust in business.

The implications for integrated reporting and reports complying with the new EU Directive are profound. Both instruments rely on agency theory to coax managers into reducing information asymmetry by disclosing more. However, agency theory only re-affirms the power managers have over corporate information. It does not change their behaviour, nor to act in the interest of all stakeholders as the stewards of an organisation’s resources.

We advocate that, in business education, greater emphasis is needed on how stewardship has a more positive impact on management behaviour than agency, legitimacy and stakeholder theories.

We reflect on the current and compelling issues permeating the international landscape of corporate reporting and disclosure and explain why current theories which explain corporate disclosures do not change behaviour or engender trust in business and offer an alternative disclosure model based on stewardship theory.

This study aims to investigate the role of regional environmental transparency on corporate environmental disclosure.

This study uses the introduction of a nationwide automated air pollution monitoring network in China as a quasi-natural experiment and employs regression analysis. Robustness checks, including parallel trend test and placebo test, are performed to test the robustness of the results.

Sharing air pollution data with the public can improve corporate environmental disclosure. Firms with poorer environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance prefer to disclose less informative information after the automated network is implemented compared with firms with better ESG performance. The relationship between information sharing and corporate environmental transparency is more pronounced when local air pollution is severer, firms face stronger investor scrutiny and firms are from heavily polluting industries. The mechanism tests suggest the automated system can draw public environmental attention and improve governments’ aspiration for environmental governance. Finally, corporate environmental disclosure can reduce stock price crash risk and cost of equity.

Real-time pollution data reporting is an important solution to raising public environmental awareness and then enhancing the effectiveness of pollution control.

This study has implications for policy-making regarding environmental governance and environmental disclosure.

This study confirms that pollution information transparency can motivate firms to increase environmental disclosure.

The principles of sustainable development argue that organizations should make decisions not only based on economic or financial factors but also based on the long-term social and environmental consequences. The Code on Corporate Governance is one of the drivers for corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in Malaysia. Additionally, the way managers execute their responsibilities may be affected by their own tradition, beliefs, values, and culture. Thus, this chapter aims to examine the relationship between corporate governance characteristics and CSR disclosure and to investigate the influence of cultural values (Board’s Culture Domination) on the relationship between corporate governance and corporate social responsibility. A sample of 150 companies from the main board of Bursa Malaysia for year ended 2006 are chosen for the purpose of this study due to the year of the introduction of Bursa Malaysia CSR Framework. Based on available data, a CSR index is constructed. Hierarchical regression analysis is used to examine the relationship between the CSR disclosure index and the independent variables and also the moderating effect of Board’s Culture Domination. Results show that government ownership and audit committees have a positive and significant influence on CSR disclosure. Furthermore, the findings show that the Board’s Culture Domination moderate the relationship between audit committee, number of shareholders, foreign ownership, and CSR disclosure.

This study aims to examine the timing of corporate disclosure in the context of Georgia, an emerging market where a recent reform of corporate financial transparency mandated about 80,000 private sector entities to publicly disclose their annual financial statements.

The main analysis covers more than 4,000 large, medium, small and micro private sector entities, for which the data is obtained from the Ministry of Finance of Georgia. This paper builds an empirical model of logit/probit regression, with industry fixed and random effects to investigate the drivers of the corporate disclosure timing.

Findings suggest that the mean reporting time lag is 279 days after the fiscal year-end, that is nine days after the statutory deadline. Almost one-third (30%) of the entities miss the nine-month statutory deadline, while the timely filers almost unexceptionally file immediately before the deadline. Multivariate tests reveal that voluntarily filing entities completed the process significantly faster than those mandated to do so; audited financial statements take more time to be filed, whereas those with unqualified audit opinion or audited by large/international audit firms are filed faster than their counterparts. The author concludes that despite the overall high filing rates, the timing of corporate disclosure is not (yet) efficiently enforced in practice (but is progressing over time), whereas regulatory incentives prevail over market incentives among the timely filers.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study that explores corporate disclosure timing incentives in the context of Georgia. This study extends prior literature on the timing of financial information from an emerging country’s private sector perspective, with juxtaposed market and regulatory incentives.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of corporate board attributes, ownership structure and firm-level characteristics on both corporate mandatory and voluntary disclosure behaviour.

Multivariate regression techniques are used to estimate the effect of corporate board and ownership structures on mandatory and voluntary disclosures of a sample of Libyan listed and non-listed firms between 2006 and 2010.

First, the authors find that board size, board composition, the frequency of board meetings and the presence of an audit committee have an impact on the level of corporate disclosure. Second, results indicate that ownership structures have a non-linear effect on the level of corporate disclosure. Finally, the authors document that firm age, liquidity, listing status, industry type and auditor type are positively associated with the level of corporate disclosure.

Future research could investigate disclosure practices using other channels of corporate disclosure media, such as corporate websites. Useful insights may be offered also by future studies by conducting in-depth interviews with corporate managers, directors and owners regarding these issues.

The evidence relating to the important role that corporate governance mechanisms play in shaping the expectations relating to the level of corporate voluntary and/or mandatory disclosures may be useful in informing investor decisions, as well as future policy and regulatory initiatives.

This paper contributes to the existing literature by examining the governance-disclosure nexus relating to both mandatory and voluntary disclosures in both listed and non-listed firms operating in a developing country setting.

The lexicon of corporate governance has ‘transparency’ as a key imperative. Yet transparency as a management principle begs explanation. It also raises several questions: transparent to whom, how and why? Who decides? Is full transparency desirable? What are its merits and benefits? What are the risks of increased transparency? The answers may lie somewhere between the shareholder and stakeholder views of the modern corporation, with the former defending shareholder-owner primacy and firm profit-maximisation, and the latter offering a values-based approach towards balancing the needs and expectations of all stakeholders. While corporate governance broadly addresses the needs of shareholders and investors, driven by the position that companies need to be better governed for stockholder value, the ‘stakeholder’ view of the corporation has gained ground over the past 20 or so years whereby the modern corporation is accountable not only to its owners, but also society.The transparency debate has emerged in parallel, and with it, issues of privacy and/or secrecy on one hand and the notion of ‘sunlight’ on the other. Transparency’s role has been variously described as the promotion of corporate disclosure and protection of the rights of minority shareholders in the information environment (Bushman & Smith, 2003); the promotion of corporate accountability and advancement of the rights of stakeholders (Clarke, 2004; Donaldson & Preston, 1995; Hess, 2007; Mallin, 2002); a tool to limit information asymmetries (Boatright, 2008; Florini, 2007a, 2007b; Hood, 2006; Lev, 1992); a means to create a level playing field through ethics and fairness (Boatright, 2008; Oliver, 2004); the promotion of market efficiency (Bessire, 2005; Heflin, Subramanyam, & Zhang, 2003); and the prevention of abuse through stakeholder activism (Bandsuch, Pate, & Thies, 2008; Roche, 2005). Aspirations aside, there is lack of consensus as to transparency's dimensions, drivers and dilemmas in corporate behaviour. Indeed, its perceived value to stakeholders and corporations alike remains questionable. In this chapter, the author discusses the governance of corporate transparency and argues that clarity and Board policy are needed to manage transparency activism and its resultant risks.

The aim of this paper is to investigate stakeholder power changes and their impact on firms' disclosure decisions in the Chinese stock market. Using legitimacy theory and stakeholder theory, the paper identifies newly emerged stakeholder groups for listed Chinese firms during three distinguished periods of the development of the Chinese stock market.

Panel data analysis was undertaken over a period from 1995‐2006 with an aim to examine the influence of stakeholder power changes on voluntary disclosures made by 297 listed firms in their 12 years of annual reports. A voluntary disclosure checklist has been used for hand‐collecting data from annual reports.

The finding shows that different stakeholder groups exert different degrees of influence on firms' decision‐making in respect of information disclosure during different stages of the development of the Chinese stock market.

The impact of a stakeholder power changes on corporate disclosure has not been well addressed and how listed Chinese firms respond to these changes is still a significant gap in the Chinese corporate disclosure literature. In this study, the paper uses proxies to represent each stakeholder group, discuss power changes of each group and predict the impact of power changes on firms' voluntary disclosure.

The paper identifies the new content of the “social contract” between listed firms and Chinese society and identifies various stakeholder groups of listed Chinese firms in the context of a new “social contract”. The paper predicts that voluntary corporate disclosure is the result of stakeholder pressures and firms use voluntary disclosure as one of their strategies to manage the firm‐stakeholder relationship.

During the current century, environmental sustainability and waste reduction processes have always been subject to scrutiny in developed societies. Developed communities have gained considerable momentum by investing in environmental infrastructure and integrating corporate performance disclosure and less developed communities are involved with it. Carbon disclosure is one of the aspects of green accounting in “corporate strategies,” especially those operating across the capital market. Adherence to the disclosure of facts can facilitate sustainable development in societies. This study aims to present strategic reference points matrix-based model to develop a framework for carbon disclosure strategies through institutional and stakeholder pressures throughout the capital market.

As a case study, by reviewing similar research on carbon disclosure, this study seeks to illustrate various carbon disclosure aspects and strategies in a matrix based on institutional (vertical axis) and stakeholder (horizontal axis) pressures

The study attempts to states that carbon disclosure is affected solely by the company because of the presence of agency gaps between external stakeholders and corporate executives.

However, the firm’s decision to adopt a carbon disclosure strategy depends on the performance of stakeholder pressure (stakeholder salience level) and managers’ perceptions of institutional pressure (institutional pressure centrality level).

The purpose of this study is to investigate the level of compliance with, and disclosure of, good corporate governance (CG) practices among UK publicly listed firms and consequently ascertain whether board characteristics and ownership structure variables can explain observable differences in the extent of voluntary CG compliance and disclosure practices.

This study uses one of the largest data sets to-date on compliance and disclosure of CG practices from 2008 to 2013 containing 120 CG provisions drawn from the 2010 UK Combined Code relating to 100 UK listed firms to conduct multiple regression analyses of the determinants of voluntary CG disclosures. A number of additional estimations, including two stage least squares, fixed-effects and lagged structures, are conducted to address the potential endogeneity issue and test the robustness of the findings.

The results suggest that there is a substantial variation in the levels of compliance with, and disclosure of, good CG practices among the sampled UK firms. The authors also find that firms with larger board size, more independent outside directors and greater director diversity tend to disclose more CG information voluntarily, whereas the level of voluntary CG compliance and disclosure is insignificantly related to the existence of a separate CG committee and institutional ownership. Additionally, the results indicate that block ownership and managerial ownership negatively affect voluntary CG compliance and disclosure practices. The findings are fairly robust across a number of econometric models that sufficiently address various endogeneity problems and alternative CG indices. Overall, the findings are generally consistent with the predictions of neo-institutional theory.

This study extends, as well as contributes to, the extant CG literature by offering new evidence on compliance with, and disclosure of, good CG recommendations contained in the 2010 UK Combined Code following the 2007/2008 global financial crisis. This study also advances the existing literature by offering new insights from a neo-institutional theoretical perspective of the impact of board and ownership mechanisms on voluntary CG compliance and disclosure practices.

The aim of this study is to apply the concept of social norm dynamics to explain how corporate governance soft law is enforced.

Using data of German listed stock companies and of economic media coverage between 2001 and 2010, the authors observe the complex relationship between sanctions and behavior in the social context of corporate governance soft law.

The authors find the public discussion of normative demands related to corporate governance issues increases if firms do not comply with the German Corporate Governance Code. The authors show that groups of actors, such as DAX companies, represent the addressees of normative demands, i.e. targets of expectations about what is appropriate and what is not. The authors also find that normative demands tend to be personalized, as public discussion is greater when initiated by a specific individual or firm. Finally, the authors demonstrate that social control in terms of public sanctioning positively influences a firm’s compliance with the soft law whereby negative statements (disapproval) outweigh the effects of positive statements (approval).

We corroborate the social character of normative demands in the context of corporate governance soft law, and contribute to a better understanding of why soft law can work, despite it having no legally binding force. The results of our study suggest that sanction mechanisms in the context of social norms underpin the strength of soft law as an alternative to, or extension of, hard law.