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While there have been extensive empirical investigations of pay-performance sensitivity, the perspective of performance-pay has received less attention to date. While executive compensation is sensitive to firm performance, firm performance is also likely to be affected by executive compensation. Adopting multiple theoretical perspectives, the purpose of this paper is to examine whether executive compensation has a greater influence on firm performance or whether the latter has a greater influence on compensation.

Using data from a five-year period (2010-2014) for Financial Times and Stock Exchange 350 companies, the authors employ a set of simultaneous equation modelling to jointly investigate, after accounting for endogeneity problem, the mutual association of executive compensation and firm performance by employing four control variables (board size, non-executive directors, leverage and boardroom ownership).

The authors find strong evidence for the greater influence of executive compensation on firm performance than the pay-performance framework. This finding supports the tournament theory compared with the agency perspective.

Inevitably, there are limitations in a wide-ranging study of this nature that could be addressed in future research. As any empirical study utilising company data, there may be concerns to the effect of survivorship bias and the manner in which companies have reorganised, if there is any, themselves during the period under examination. There are also issues as to missing data, some measures relating to both executive compensation and corporate governance are not provided by the BoardEx database.

The study results provide evidence that using the tournament perspective by remuneration committees as a guide for determining executive compensation helps in achieving better performance. This helps in developing appropriate mechanisms for setting executive remuneration.

This paper combines an empirical investigation of the frameworks of pay-performance and performance-pay and develops a system of six simultaneous equations to examine the associations between executive compensation and firm performance.

This study aims mainly to test the effect of audit committee independence and expertise attributes on corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting, assurance and global reporting initiative (GRI) framework adoption and to investigate how CSR committee existence moderates this main relationship.

The study uses a large global sample that includes all (59,172) firm-year observations having CSR-related data in the Thomson Reuters Eikon database for a period between 2002 and 2019. The empirical analyses are based on random-effects logistic panel regression and Hayes methodology for the moderation analysis.

The study finds that audit committee independence and expertise are significantly associated with CSR reporting, CSR report assurance and GRI framework adoption. Moderation analysis largely supports the existence of a substitution role between audit and CSR committees and implies that audit committees are significant predictors of CSR reporting, assurance and GRI framework adoption mostly in the absence of the CSR committee.

The findings propose audit committee members be extra-vigilant in CSR reporting and assurance practices arising from undertaking substitution roles with the CSR committee. Hence, firms may configure their corporate structure in line with the results such as augmenting the audit committee with independent and expert members if they do not constitute a CSR committee. If firms establish a CSR committee, audit committee members may allocate less time to CSR reporting and assurance and more time to financial reporting quality.

This is the first study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to investigate the direct and indirect effect of audit committees’ attributes not only on CSR disclosure but also on GRI implementation and CSR reporting external assurance, considering the CSR committee’s possible substitutability or complementarity moderating role. This research develops a deeper understanding of audit committees’ non-financial role.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework emerged as a guidepost for the transition to sustainable development. To achieve this transition, companies are encouraged to integrate these goals into their business strategies, processes and corporate reporting cycle. The purpose of this paper is to review and critique the corporate SDGs reporting literature, develop insights into the state of this research field and identify a future research agenda.

Using a structured literature review (SLR) methodology, the paper reviews 65 empirical papers published in this field to identify how the current research is developing, offers a critique and identifies future research avenues to advance this field.

Corporate SDGs reporting is developing as a research area of great importance. The findings reveal that current SDGs reporting literature lacks theorisation, overly focusses on publicly listed companies and succinctly describes organisations’ engagement with the SDGs as superficial. Surprisingly, regions such as North America, the UK and other emerging economies have received less attention from scholars. Further, only a few authors have specialised in this field, and there currently exists low levels of international collaborations among authors as well as practitioners.

The paper provides a novel contribution to the emerging field of corporate SDGs reporting. The key theoretical implications from this study’s SLR include the need for more interventionist research. Although there is an increasing number of accounting scholars developing research within this field, the prevailing research is concentrated on corporate SDGs engagement, drivers of SDGs reporting and scope of SDGs reporting. Furthermore, the scientific discourse remains largely under-theorised with positivist framings primarily focussed on the “what” questions. Thus, a modification to the current approaches and research methods is necessary to advance this field further.

The study provides practitioners with valuable insights into the current state of corporate reporting on the SDGs. To achieve more substantive engagement and reporting, a deeper understanding of the factors that influence corporate behaviour and disclosure practices is necessary. In particular, the study identifies new opportunities for practitioners to enhance the value relevance of corporate SDGs reporting.

The paper offers a comprehensive structured review of the empirical papers published on corporate SDGs reporting. It contributes to deepening this nascent research field by identifying five distinct areas where accounting and business scholars may focus to advance the field further and contribute to achieving the SDGs agenda.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the association between sustainability reporting (SR) and firm value considering the moderating effect of audit committee (AC) quality and auditor tenure on this association.

The data for the study comprise 41,500 firm-year observations worldwide between 2007 and 2018 drawing on ten main sectors. The authors run a country-industry-year fixed effect regression and address endogeneity concerns with further methodologies.

First, the authors find that SR is significantly and positively associated with both firm value and industry-adjusted firm value. Further tests revealed that the baseline findings hold for SR assurance and the Global Reporting Initiative framework as well. Second, the moderation analysis outlined the significant moderating role that the AC assumes. More specifically, AC independence and expertise were found to strengthen the value relevance of SR. Third, the market also appreciates the moderation of auditor tenure in SR.

Investors appreciate greater corporate transparency which means that sustainability reports are likely to reduce information asymmetry and thereby agency conflicts. In addition, the moderation analyses imply that shareholders consider AC quality while they attach value to corporate sustainability reports. Hence, the structure of the auditing function appears to perform an implicit assurance role in the value relevance of sustainability reports. In line with these implications, corporations can review and re-design their auditing function and decide whether or not they will attest to sustainability reports given that AC independence and expertise and auditor tenure predict this decision.

The study highlights the audit function’s growing role beyond financial reporting and suggests implications for ACs and auditors in ensuring shareholders about the credibility of SR.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the influential and intellectual aspects of the literature on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region's banking activities.

This study undertakes a bibliometric meta-analysis review of the GCC region banking literature, covering 199 articles published between 2004 and 2022, extracted from the Web of Science (WoS) database, followed by a content analysis of highly cited papers.

This paper identifies the influential aspects of the GCC region banking literature in terms of journals, articles, authors, universities and countries. The paper also identifies and discusses five major research clusters: (1) bank efficiency; (2) corporate governance (CG) and disclosure; (3) performance and risk-taking; (4) systemic risk, bank stability and risk spillovers and (5) intellectual capital (IC). Finally, it identifies gaps in the literature and highlights some important research issues that provide directions for future research.

This paper is limited to the articles indexed in the WoS database and written in English. Though the WoS database encompasses a wide range of multidisciplinary journals, there is a chance that some relevant articles are not included in the WoS database or written in another language.

This study provides regulators, practitioners and academics with valuable insight and an in-depth understanding of the banking system of the GCC region.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first review paper on GCC region banking literature. This study provides regulators, practitioners and academics with valuable insight and an in-depth understanding of the banking system of the GCC region.

This paper reviews the field of internal auditing (IA) post-Enron to develop insights into how IA research has developed, offer a critique of the research to date and identify ways that future research can help to advance IA.

A structured literature review (SLR) was used to analyse 471 papers from 64 journals published between 2005 and 2018 based on a number of criteria, namely author, journal type, journal location, year, theme, theory, nature of research, research setting, regional focus, method and citations.

The IA literature has not significantly contributed to knowledge of the internal audit function (IAF), and one still knows relatively little about the factors that contribute to making the impact of IA practice effective and measurable. The IA literature is US-dominated (authors and journals), focussed on the American context (publicly listed companies), reliant on positivist analyses and largely makes no explicit reference to theory. Central regions (emerging economies) and key organisational settings (private SMEs and not-for-profit organisations) are largely absent in prior IA research. This paper evaluates and identifies avenues through which future research can help to advance IA in order to address emerging challenges in the field.

This is the first comprehensive review to analyse IA research in the post-Enron period (2005–2018). The findings are relevant to researchers who are looking for appropriate research outlets and emerging scholars who wish to identify their own research directions.

This study aims to examine how the legitimacy of internal auditing is reconstructed during enterprise resource planning (ERP)-driven technological change.

The study is based on the comparative analysis of internal auditing and its transformation due to ERP implementations at two case firms operating in the food sector in Egypt – one a major Egyptian multinational corporation (MNC) and the other a major domestic company (DC).

Internal auditors (IAs) at MNC saw ERP implementation as an opportunity to reconstruct the legitimacy of internal auditing work by engaging and partnering with actors involved with the ERP change. In doing so, the IAs acquired system certifications and provided line functions and external auditors with data-driven business insights. The “practical coping mechanism” adopted by the IAs led to the acceptance (and legitimacy) of their work. In contrast, IAs at DC adopted a purposeful strategy of disengaging, blaming and rejecting since they were skeptical of the top management team's (TMT's) sincerity. The “disinterestedness” led to the loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the stakeholders.

The article offers two contributions. First, it extends the literature by highlighting a spectrum of behavior displayed by IAs (coping with impending issues vs strategic purposefulness) during ERP-driven technological change. Second, the article contributes to the literature on legitimacy by highlighting four intertwined micro-processes – participating, socializing, learning and role-forging – that contribute to reconstructing the legitimacy of internal auditing.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework that helps to investigate how the internal audit function (IAF) responds to both the introduction of the control logic of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, and corporate governance’s (CG) institutional pressures. Furthermore, the paper aims to articulate the concurrence between the external pressures of CG and internal control logic of ERP systems.

The paper presents a review of the normative literature pertaining to the increase in significance of CG in the light of the worldwide economic crisis. The paper highlights a literature gap related to the lack of studies focusing on the impact of ERP systems implementation on the IAF practices.

The authors articulate institutional theory to formulate a conceptual framework that explains the reciprocal interplay between the macro external governance pressures, micro internal institutional logics inscribed in the ERP systems and their effect on IAF practices and structure within organisations.

The paper is conceptual in nature and therefore the proposed framework will be subsequently validated using a qualitative research approach in future research.

The conceptual framework would offer the internal auditors some strategies for enabling adaptation to the different internal and external pressures. Also the paper provides a platform for research community to investigate the influence of CG and ERP systems implementation on IAF adaptation.

The paper provides a clearer articulation of the various constructs that affect the IAF, which has gained great attention for assuring good CG.