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The purpose of this study is to assess the differential impact on the stock market of statements made by and information about directors and companies who are politically connected, compared to directors and companies with no political connections. The authors also analyze the role played by state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which the authors have identified as politically connected companies because most board members are appointed by political authorities. Furthermore, the boundaries and institutional environment within which SOEs operate are likely to be different from private companies.

The sample is composed of over 60,000 news articles on the boards of directors (both with political roles and without political roles) of listed Italian companies in the period 1998–2013. On that sample the authors run a regression analysis under the signaling theory approach.

Results suggest a positive effect on market capitalization associated with individual political connections. This effect decreases when the political connection extends to the whole enterprise although it still remains, while a negative effect is associated with state-controlled enterprises. The impact of negative news content does not change depending on whether a board member has a political role or not.

Previous research has demonstrated a causal link between stock prices and their reaction to corporate news (Engelberg and Parsons, 2011; Peress, 2014), but no studies have quantified the different reactions that occur when the news mentions politically connected companies and individuals who hold a political role.

This study investigates if and how the board size, the board independence, the CEO duality and the board-specific skills are associated with higher-quality Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) disclosure in European State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs).

We measured SDGs disclosure through a content analysis of SOE's reports from 2017 to 2022. The characteristics of the boards analyzed are board size, board independence, CEO duality and board-specific skills. We performed multiple regression models to test the association between the SDGs disclosure and the characteristics of the boards.

The results show that board size, independent directors and board-specific skills are positively associated with higher-quality SDGs disclosure, while CEO duality is negatively associated with higher-quality SDGs disclosure.

This study provides several practical implications. Shareholders could equip their firms with larger boards, more independent and highly skilled directors, while avoiding a CEO duality for improving the SDGs disclosure; capital providers could examine the characteristics of a firm's board before allocating financial resources to verify which firms are accountable in reaching the SDGs. Also, standard-setters and policymakers could use the results of this research to define new standards or regulatory pathways to push firms to put more efforts in preparing a comprehensive and high-quality SDGs disclosure.

While prior studies mostly focused on sustainability reporting overall, this study adds a specific insight about SDGs disclosure employing an investigation which has not been previously analyzed.