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The purpose of this study is to analyse the role played by institutional investors in a firm’s decision to hire sustainability assurance services and to determine the benefits of sustainability assurance for the functioning of the capital market. This analysis is complemented by examining the quality of the sustainability assurance service that institutional investors demand.

The authors selected a sample of 1,564 multinational firms from 2002 to 2017. Panel data logit and generalised method of moments (GMM) regressions were estimated to consider decisions about hiring sustainability assurance services or not, and the assurance quality indexes constructed by a checklist based on the academic literature, respectively.

Institutional pressures associated with the environmental and social impacts of a firm’s activities lead to the convergence of institutional investor attitudes towards corporate sustainability, so that, regardless of their investment horizon, they promote the hiring of sustainability assurance services by corporate boards, which favours analyst precision and a reduction in the cost of capital. Long-term (LT) institutional investors exert influence through a selection mechanism, whereas short-term (ST) institutional investors exert influence through their presence on the board. Once the company has decided to provide assurance about its sustainability report, both types of institutional investors promote a higher quality of such service, although this is not well valued by the stock market.

This paper extends research on the monitoring role of institutional investors into the sustainability assurance context. Researchers may benefit from this paper’s findings when they examine the factors that drive the hiring of sustainability assurance services and their characteristics. This paper also shows that sustainability assurance services are a significant weakness due to the lack of standardisation in comparison with financial auditing, which complicates the assessment of their quality by stock market participants, thereby penalising those companies that provide more complete sustainability assurance reports.

Considering this paper’s findings, it seems advisable that regulators establish a normative framework to standardise sustainability assurance processes. The results can also be used as an orientation for both companies, to design their sustainability disclosure policies and regulators, to improve the running of the capital market.

Sustainability assurance services have a positive effect on the running of the capital market and improve external stakeholder decision-making by providing more reliable information, which, in turn, will favour the implementation of more sustainable actions that contribute to the attainment of sustainable development goals.

This is one of the first papers to analyse the effect of institutional ownership on a firm’s decision to hire sustainability assurance services and consider the effect of the institutional investors’ investment horizon – LT versus ST – and the channel – selection methods and/or active engagement – used by them to exert their influence. The authors also propose several measures of sustainability assurance quality to demonstrate the relevance of the contents of the assurance statement for the capital market in general and the institutional investors in particular.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether gender diversity on board and financial expertise on audit committee affect accounting conservatism in banking sector. Additionally, the authors focus on the effects of board characteristics on bank earnings quality and examine their effects on earnings persistence.

The authors use a large sample of 159 banks from nine different countries from the period 2004-2010. The authors study whether the differences in the timeliness of earnings to bad news and earnings quality across governance structures of banks are driven by differences across investor protection and bank regulation levels in banks.

The findings confirm the monitoring role of both female and financial experts, noting a positive effect of them on accounting conservatism and earnings quality in banks. According to the institutional characteristics, the results suggest the complementary role of banking regulation and investor protection levels in these effects, noting that in contexts of higher regulatory and greater investor protection environments, gender diversity and financial expertise on boards have more influence on the conservatism and earnings quality of banks.

The authors contribute to both the accounting quality literature and the corporate governance literature by identifying board characteristics that are associated with higher conservatism and quality of earnings in banks around the world. In addition, this study also contributes to the ethics literature by highlighting the benefits of gender diversity and financial expertise in upholding the integrity of financial reporting. Moreover, this paper adds to prior literature about board of directors and accounting quality by identifying additional complementary factors – bank regulation and investor protection – and by focusing on a specific industry, the banking industry.

For almost half a century, society has been aware of the existence of a glass ceiling, a term that describes the invisible barriers that hinder women’s access to power positions despite having equal or greater qualifications, skills and merits than their male counterparts. Nowadays, although there are signs of slow progress, women are still underrepresented in the upper echelons of large corporations and the risk of reversing the progress made in gender parity has increased because of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper contributes to previous literature by analysing the impact that the uncertainty and cognitive effects associated with COVID-19 in 2020 had on the presence of women on the board of directors and whether this impact has been moderated by the regulatory and policy system on gender quotas in place at the time.

To test the authors' research hypotheses, the authors selected the major global companies worldwide with economic-financial and non-financial information available in the Thomson Reuters EIKON database over the 2015–2020 period. As a result, the authors' final sample is made up of 1,761 companies from 52 countries with different institutional settings that constitute an unbalanced data panel of 8,963 observations. The nature of the dependent variables requires the use of logistic regressions. The models incorporate the terms to control for any unobservable heterogeneity and the error term. Any endogeneity issues were addressed by considering the explanatory variables with a time lag.

The authors find that almost 30% of the companies downsized their boards in 2020. This decision resulted in more female than male directors being made redundant, causing a reversal in the fulfilment of gender quotas focussed on ensuring balanced boards with a female presence of 40% or more. This effect was enhanced in countries with hard-law regulation because the penalty for non-compliance with gender quotas had led to a significant increase in the size of these bodies in previous years through the inclusion of the required number of female directors. In contrast, the reduction in board size in soft-law countries does not differ from that in laissez-faire countries, lacking any moderating effect or impact on the number of female board members dismissed as a result of the pandemic.

This paper aims to contribute to current knowledge by analysing the impact that the countries' regulatory and normative systems on gender parity on boards of directors have had on the decisions made in relation to leadership positions, moderating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender equality at a global level.

This study aims to analyse the role that the chief executive officer (CEO) has on integrated reporting (IR) adoption and whether this role is moderated by incentives to promote corporate transparency, including information asymmetry problems and financial constraints. IR represents the last frontier of corporate disclosure and aims to represent, through the annual integrated report, the ability of an organization to create value over time.

This study is based on 10,819 observations (an unbalanced data panel of 1,588 firms for the period 2009–2017). A logistic regression model is used to examine the association between CEO power and disclosure of an integrated report.

The results show that CEOs with greater power oppose the disclosure of integrated information, and this behaviour is not modified by firms’ incentives. Furthermore, greater growth opportunities increase CEO opposition to disclosing integrated information on the creation of value, perhaps as a consequence of the possible use of it by competitors.

This study contributes to the existing literature. First, it expands the scientific debate on the topic of IR. Second, it extends the application field of agency theory, which is seldom used to explain the phenomena related to IR.

In view of the significant deficiencies that have been observed in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting practices, some companies have undertaken a new communication strategy based on a combination of the GRI guidelines and the IFC Performance Standards (termed the GRI-IFC strategy). This paper aims to analyse the role of the CSR committee and of assurance services in promoting this novel practice.

The authors use an unbalanced sample of 750 international companies that operate in emerging markets for the years 2011-2016, in which logistic and ordinal regressions are applied to the panel data to test the research hypotheses.

The results show that the existence of a CSR committee facilitates adoption of the GRI-IFC strategy, thus promoting sustainable management policies and systems and enhancing communication with stakeholders. In addition, these specialised committees often commission assurance for sustainability reports, to reinforce strategies aimed at improving corporate transparency.

The analysis of mediation shows that diverse characteristics of corporate governance mechanisms interact in improving sustainability and business transparency.

There is an evident need for greater commitment by institutions to sustainability, for example by requiring greater specialisation of the members of the CSR committee in social and environmental issues. In addition, consideration should be given to including the creation of a CSR committee as a good practice, within the code of corporate governance and to establishing a specific framework for the committee’s actions.

The previously cited impacts of this paper all contribute indirectly to a greater social welfare by generating higher levels of transparency, ethics and corporate performance. Specifically, higher quality verification services will have an impact on the improved functioning of the financial and capital markets, as well as in decision-making by internal and external stakeholders with more reliable information that will favour the implementation of more sustainable processes that in the short and long term will mean more companies who are responsible towards the environment and society.

This novel study explains why companies adopt voluntary strategies in compliance with GRI guidelines, seeking to provide better CSR disclosure.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how family ownership influences the strength of the board’s monitoring function in companies’ decisions regarding the assurance of sustainability reports.

The international sample consists of 536 companies operating in more stakeholder-oriented countries during the period 2007-2014. The paper proposes alternative logit models of analysis using the random-effects estimator.

The results provide evidence that a firm’s sustainability assurance and its choice of accounting professionals as higher quality assurers are positively associated with board size and independence. The main result is the positive impact of family businesses on these assurance issues. The paper evidences the greater orientation toward sustainability issues of family businesses. Furthermore, it verifies the greater impact of board size on family firms’ assurance demand.

This study sheds some light on the unexplored topic of sustainability assurance in family firms. One of the differentiating aspects with respect to previous studies is the consideration of the moderating factor of family property. This study also contributes to the understanding of family firms’ demand for assurance and its practitioners, and the literature’s focus on its determinants.

This paper aims to analyse the use of level of debt as an external control mechanism against an entrenchment strategy based on corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices.

The authors use a database of 1,916 international companies for the years 2002 to 2010.

The evidence obtained confirms in a context of asymmetric information, bounded rationality and divergent interests, the use of debt as a control mechanism of managers’ discretionary comportment. In other words, CSR practices can be used by managers as an entrenchment strategy and self-defence with the aim of decreasing the possibility of being identified by those shareholders and stakeholders whose interests have been damaged. In this context, the market demands higher debt levels to solve agency frictions, playing an active role in monitoring the management. Moreover, the demand of higher debt as a control mechanism that minimises the expropriation risk by managers through CSR is lower in contexts of greater investor protection.

The findings reveal that CSR engagement can be explained by the hypothesis of being a strategy of entrenchment and self-defence. Overall, this study differs from previous literature in this field by taking an alternative approach to CSR practices, in contrast to the conventional wisdom of the benefits of CSR practices. The authors contribute by empirically testing the theoretical model proposed by Cespa and Cestone (2007) who suggest the discretionary use of CSR from an agency perspective. They also give empirical relief showing the use of CSR as an entrenchment strategy. Moreover, they demonstrate that the capital market of debt decreases in a context with a greater degree of investor protection, likewise under CSR promoted as an entrenchment tool, the demand for debt as a disciplinary mechanism is less necessary to control managers. In addition, the study is enriched by the database analysis.

This study investigates the relationship between national culture and the country level of firms' digitalisation, by applying Hofstede's cultural framework to the European Union member states. Although many studies have observed the impact of national culture on firms' innovation and information and communication technology (ICT) adoption, there have been no analyses of how cultural dimensions impact firms' digitalisation at the country level. This study intends to fill that gap.

Using a pooled ordinary least square (OLS) model, this study analyses data from 27 European countries over the period from 2014 to 2018.

The results suggest the existence of a negative, significant, relationship between both masculinity and uncertainty avoidance, and the country level of firms' digitalisation. Indulgence is found to positively and significantly influence a country's level of digitalisation. Contrary to expectations, this study indicates a negative, significant, relationship between individualism and the degree of digitalisation. Power distance is found to have no significant impact.

This study contributes to the literature by showing how a country's various cultural dimensions help or hinder the level of firms' digitalisation in that country. Theoretical and managerial implications are presented, including suggestions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the moderating effect of media pressure on external directors in relation to disclosure of information on corporate social responsibility (CSR).

The paper adopts a multilevel approach, integrating the institutional, organisational and individual levels of analysis in a whole model that explains corporate transparency. The paper uses a sample composed of 98 non-financial listed Spanish companies for the period 2004-2010,

The results show heterogeneity between external board members. Proprietary directors, representing shareholders, tend to promote adoption of the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines in order to increase value for shareholders. On the contrary, independent directors are risk adverse in relation to the effect that CSR information disclosure could have on their professional reputations.

The sample could be improved, including companies from different countries and more years for the analysis, since the period studied comprises a particular economic setting (2008-2010), a global financial crisis.

Although these results from the Spanish context, the authors recommend that regulatory bodies incorporate provisions into good governance codes that guarantee the existence of quality and comparable CSR information that favours stakeholders’ decision taking.

The image that society has about a company comes from the opinions created from the mass media. The arguments proposed by agenda-setting theory can be managed by companies as a strategic mechanism to respond to society expectations. At present, two of the most studied aspects are the ethical and sustainable behaviours of organisations. These aspects are related to the characteristics of boards of directors, especially to external directors. Independent directors may disagree with disclosing information about CSR practices because they fear that this information would affect their professional reputations, since they are not specialised in these topics. However, proprietary directors favour the disclosure of this information in an attempt to reduce the cost of capital and risk perceived by investors, especially in more sustainable companies.

The purpose of this paper is to verify if the characteristics of the board of directors (BD) affects the disclosure practices of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Two different population samples were used from the period 2008-2011: Brazilian listed companies and Spanish companies. It is observed that the size of the board positively affects CSR disclosure practices of the two groups of companies. The percentage of independent directors of the board members positively affects the disclosure practices of CSR in Spanish companies. The percentage of participants of the board women positively impacts the disclosure practices of CSR in Brazilian companies.

The authors worked with two different population samples: one, composed by the Brazilian listed companies in BM&FBOVESPA and other by Spanish companies listed on Madrid Stock Exchange. The selection of this period was due to the increase in the adoption of GRI guidelines from 2008 (Prado-Lorenzo et al., 2012). In addition, as Spanish companies disclose more CSR reports according to the GRI guidelines (Global Reporting Initiative, 2012), this is a suitable environment for the analysis.

Regarding the research question of this study, it was found that the profile of the board affects the disclosure practices of CSR of Brazilian and Spanish companies. The size of the board positively affects CSR disclosure practices of the two groups of companies. The percentage of independent directors of the board members positively affects the disclosure practices of CSR in Spanish companies. The percentage of participants of the board women positively impacts the disclosure practices of CSR in Brazilian companies.

Both the BD of Spanish companies as the Brazilian still requires the participation of a greater number of women. It is important to remember that the variable that represents women in the board presented a positive impact on the dependent variables, and it is statistically significant, so it is possible to affirm that when a large number of women are on the Board, the company tends to disclose more standardized information about CSR practices. These results are in line to other empirical analysis that defend that women usually introduce more philanthropic worries (Ibrahim and Angelidis, 1991) and tend to provide higher information transparency, especially about sustainability issues (Barako and Brown, 2008; Prado-Lorenzo and García-Sánchez, 2010; Frías-Aceituno et al., 2012).

This research should benefit, in this sense, investors, managers and policymakers, civil society representatives and corporate managers themselves active in the two economies investigated.

It should be noticed that both Brazil and Spain use to encourage joint research between researchers of Brazilian and Spanish universities, funding projects developed in partnership as Cooperation Programme signed in 2001 by the Ministries of Education in both countries. Thus, it is justified the choice of Spain for its comparative analysis due to the need for more field studies on this topic in both countries, and also that it has been promoted by their governments.

It is expected that the results of this research contribute to the identification of relevant factors in disclosure of corporate environmental policies and actions that may be useful in the decision-making process of various stakeholders. Such identification will also allow us to identify possible relationships between environmental initiatives, the profile of BD.