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This study aims to investigate whether social reputation via corporate social responsibility (CSR) awarding facilitates access to debt and decreases the cost of debt and whether governance mechanisms moderate this relationship.

The sample covers the period between 2002 and 2021, during which CSR award data were available in the Thomson Reuters Eikon/Refinitiv database. The empirical models are based on country, industry and year fixed-effects regression.

While the main findings produced an insignificant result for access to debt, they indicated strong evidence for the positive relationship between CSR awarding and the cost of debt. Moreover, the moderating effect highlights that while the sustainability committee helps CSR-awarded companies access debt more easily, independent directors help firms decrease the cost of debt via CSR awarding. Furthermore, the results differ between the US and the non-US samples, earlier and recent periods, high- and low-leverage firms and large and small firms.

For the first time, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the authors assess whether social reputation via CSR awarding facilitates access to debt and decreases the cost of debt in an international and cross-industry sample. Little is known about the effect of social reputation on loan contracting, although social reputation conveys broader information that goes beyond the firm’s internal (performance) and external (reporting) CSR practices. The authors also draw attention to the differing roles of distinct governance mechanisms in leveraging social reputation for loan contracting.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of manager attributes and psychological factors on the adoption of sustainability reporting (SR) among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Ghana.

The study is based on a cross-sectional data gathered using questionnaires administered to managers of SMEs in Ghana. The data is analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The results reveal that SME managers with requisite educational qualifications and knowledge about sustainability accounting adopt SR. The attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control of managers of SMEs on issues of sustainability also affect the adoption of SR. However, SMEs with old and long-serving managers do not adopt SR. SMEs with manager attributes such as professional education, gender and religious affiliation do not appear to adopt SR.

There is the need for regulators and other stakeholders to sensitize, persuade and provide awareness, training and educational certification to support managers of SMEs to enable them to adopt SR.

This study contributes to the literature on SR by offering a clear understanding of how manager attributes and psychological factors influence the adoption of SR by SMEs in developing countries.