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Risk information provides information to enable stakeholders to make informed decisions about a company. Corporate communications should be readable and unbiased so as not to hamper disclosure usefulness. This study assesses whether risk disclosures in the integrated reports are readable and unbiased.

The readability and narrative tone of South African listed companies' risk and risk management disclosures as disclosed in their integrated reports are analysed using automated software for the Top 40 JSE listed companies from 2015 to 2019.

The results show that risk and risk management disclosures are unreadable and lack any improvement in readability during the period. Additionally, these disclosures are biased toward narrative tones signalling communality and certainty.

The study adds to the literature on the readability of corporate reports, by focussing on the readability and narrative tone of risk and risk management disclosures during a period of increased scrutiny over the content of such disclosures. Also, by analysing risk disclosure and risk management disclosure separately, and by performing trend analysis to determine whether requirement changes related to content (specifically King IV) affect readability and narrative tones.

This research aims to understand how companies communicate their understanding of water-related challenges and their responses to identify new pathways for addressing this challenge to further advance rising interest in water sustainability strategies of corporations.

Through a content analysis of corporate disclosures, this paper identifies the actions and challenges reported by 35 FTSE 100 companies. These are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively to explore variations in the subject of disclosure and the narrative framing.

The findings identify a clear split across the types of water sustainability reporting according to the industrial sector and subject of disclosure, linking to different narratives used according to legitimacy pressures.

This paper finds that energy, materials and consumer staples sectors consistently outperform other sectors on the reporting of water issues and the scope which is covered. This has implications for the design of regulations and incentives to increase water sustainability management activities in large companies, which currently under-report.

This paper highlights the need for policy implementation to further integrate water-related topics into company reporting and identifies situations where the narrative disclosed may distort the underlying situation that is being communicated.

This paper explores the narratives used in company reporting to identify the challenges related to water sustainability and the actions taken in response. This can contribute to developing a pathway towards increased water sustainability (e.g. through new policy design).

Companies are often accused of using sustainability disclosures as public relations tools to manage financial and non-financial stakeholders' impressions. The purpose of our study was firstly to determine how comprehensive the human rights disclosures of a sample of large international companies were and secondly, whether different narrative styles are associated with levels of disclosure to manage readers' impressions about the company. We analysed the public human rights disclosures for 154 large, international companies obtained from the UN Guiding Principles Reporting website. On average, companies complied with only one-third of the UN Guiding Principles Reporting Framework criteria. Communication about policies has the highest compliance, whilst communication about determining which human rights aspects are salient to the company, remedies for transgressions and stakeholder engagement have the lowest disclosure. When we split the sample between high disclosure and low disclosure companies, we found that the readability of the human rights disclosures is exceptionally low and even more so for low disclosure companies. Low disclosure companies used words implying Satisfaction significantly more than high disclosure companies, which provides some support for suspecting that low disclosure companies practise impression management by only presenting a ‘rosy picture’, as well as obfuscation via low readability. We add to the literature on impression management by large corporations in their sustainability reporting, and specifically human rights disclosures, by revealing how the interplay of low disclosure, low readability and overuse of words signalling Satisfaction contributes to impression management, rather than sincere attempts at accountability to all stakeholders.

This paper aims to investigate the association between negative tone in annual report narratives and future performance in the UK context. Under the principle-based approach in the UK, managers tend to bias the tone of narrative reports upward, as the reporting regime is more flexible than the rule-based approach in the USA. Consequently, any negative disclosure not mandated by regulators conveys credible information about a firm’s prospects.

This paper uses a sample of UK FTSE all-share non-financial companies from 2010 to 2019. The authors use the textual-analysis approach based on Loughran and McDonald (2011)’s wordlist (LM) to measure the negative tone in UK annual reports.

The results show a significant negative association between negative tone and future performance. Moreover, our further analyses suggest that only the negativity in the executive section of the annual disclosures correlates significantly with future performance. In summary, this study suggests that negativity does matter under the principle-based approach and can be used as an indicator of future performance.

In contrast to the literature arguing that only positivity has the power to affect a firm’s outcomes under the principle-based approach, the authors provide new empirical evidence suggesting that negativity also matters within the UK context and can be used as an indicator for future performance. Also, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to identify which section of the annual report is more informative about a firm’s future performance.

This study aims to examine the impact of a firm’s financial performance on forward-looking disclosure (FLD) tone and assess whether managers are engaging in impression management or providing truthful explanations when their companies have good or poor performance.

This study used the content analysis method to measure the tone of FLD in the chairman’s statements of Omani financial institutions for the period 2014–2018. Regression analysis is then used to test the research hypotheses.

The authors found that good-performing firms are disclosing more good news, whereas poor-performing firms disclose more bad news. The results provided evidence that managers in Oman are providing truthful explanations in their narratives.

This study offered interesting policy and practical implications for policymakers, managers and stakeholders. This paper provided insights to policymakers regarding the FLD tone practices used in the chairman’s reports in Oman. Policymakers should be aware of the importance of the chairman’s reports in the eye of multiple stakeholders and, therefore, need to set guidelines on the type and quality of non-financial voluntary information that should be disclosed in such reports in the context of emerging economies. For academics, evidence has been provided by this study’s results regarding the impact of corporate performance on disclosure tone.

This study offered a novel contribution to disclosure studies by being the first to examine the performance-disclosure narrative tone relation, in the context of Oman.

Hair loss is often overlooked but psychologically challenging. However, the emergence of online health communities provides opportunities for hair loss patients to seek social support through self-disclosure. Nevertheless, not all disclosures receive the desired support. This research explores what patients disclose within the community and how their health narrative (content, form and linguistic style) regarding self-disclosure influences the social support they receive.

This study investigated a 13-year-old online support group for Chinese hair loss patients with nearly 240,000 members. Using structural topic modeling, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count, and a negative binomial model, the research analyzed the content of self-disclosure and the interrelationships between social support and three narrative dimensions of self-disclosure.

Self-disclosures are classified into 14 topics, grouped under analytical, informative and emotional categories. Emotion-related self-disclosures, whether in content or effective word use, receive deeper social support. Longer and image-rich posts attract more support in quantity, but not necessarily in quality, while cognitive words have a limited impact.

This study addresses the previously overlooked population of hair loss patients within online health communities. It employs a more comprehensive health narrative framework to explore the relationship between self-disclosure and social support, utilizing unsupervised structural topic modeling methods to mine text. The research offers practical implications for how patients seek support and for healthcare professionals in developing doctor-patient communication strategies.

The study seeks to evaluate the extent and quality of environmental reporting following a longitudinal analysis and covering a wide spectrum of industries in a single frame. The study also attempts to identify the set of most favored environmental reporting items by firms and items which are least disclosed. Furthermore, the study attempts to test whether certain corporate attributes such as firm size, age of the firm, leverage ratio, profitability, presence of independent directors in the board and gender diversity have any influencing power over environmental disclosure practices. The whole study has been carried out from legitimacy theory setting.

The study follows longitudinal analysis to identify the extent and quality of environmental disclosures. A self-constructed checklist of 12 environmental reporting items has been developed analyzing the annual report and content analysis method is followed to measure the extent and quality of environmental disclosures and identify environmental reporting items which are mostly disclosed and which are least disclosed. The study further uses panel data regression analysis to investigate whether certain corporate attributes have any impact on environmental disclosures using multiple linear regression. Total of 345 annual reports of listed financial and nonfinancial institutions have been observed in this study ranging from 2015 to 2019.

The key finding suggests that strict enforcement of Green Banking Rules 2011 fosters country’s commercial banks to invest more to protect the environment and commercial banks encourage nonfinancial institutions for environmental performance and related disclosures through finance. Therefore, almost 50% of sample firms disclose their environmental performance through reporting in either narrative, quantitative or monetary format which was only 2.23% in the last decade. Findings also reveal that tree plantation is the most reported environment disclosure followed by investment in renewable energy and green infrastructural projects and the least reported items are fund allocation for climatic changes and carbon management policy. Further analysis shows that firm size and leverage ratio both have positive impact on environmental reporting.

An in-depth analysis may be conducted to identify why certain environmental items are least disclosed such as fund allotment for climatic changes, carbon management policy, etc. and how corporations may earn social appreciation and motivation by investing in those least preferred items in legitimacy theory setting. Future research may also take into consideration other corporate attributes which are not considered in the study.

The study conducted an in-depth analysis to understand the most favored form of environmental disclosures (narrative/quantitative/monetary) and their extent after incorporation of regulatory guidelines, which is the first of its kind in the research of environmental disclosures. The study indeed contributes to the documentation of environmental reporting in the context of a developing country where there is a lack of longitudinal analysis from the lens of legitimacy theory. Moreover, a wide spectrum of industries has been taken into consideration which facilitates the generalized findings on the environmental disclosure practices of corporations in Bangladesh.

本研究擬評估公司報告環境方面的程度和質量, 以及對就環境報告披露而言、最受青睞和最不受歡迎的項目加以處理。研究亦擬測試企業屬性對實踐環境信息披露的影響。

研究使用內容分析法、去測量環境信息披露的程度和質量。研究使用多元回歸分析、去探討企業屬性對環境信息披露的影響。研究涵蓋孟加拉國上市公司共345個年度報告, 涵蓋的年期為2015年至 2019年。

研究結果似乎顯示綠色金融規則 - 2011 、成功鼓勵機構為保護環境而投放更多資源; 機構最樂於匯報的項目為植樹, 而披露最少的則為氣候變化和碳管理政策。進一步的研究分析顯示, 公司的規模和杠杆比率均會對環境匯報帶來正面的影響。

本研究豐富了關於發展中國家環境匯報的官方文件記錄, 而在這類國家, 透過合法化理論而進行的縱貫性分析研究頗為缺乏。本研究以深度分析法、去瞭解環境信息披露方面最受青睞的信息披露方式 (故事形式的敘述/定量形式/金融形式), 也去瞭解納入強制的規管指引後環境信息披露的程度; 就此而言, 本研究為這類環境信息披露研究的首個研究。

This paper explores how the disclosure quality, measured by the abnormal tone of environmental and social report, may determine the environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) performance of the firm. This study also investigates the impact of the moderator “board of directors” to explore the extent to which a well-balanced board of directors may affect this association within an impression management strategy.

This work uses a sample of 616 firm-year observations using a sample of French firms indexed on SBF120 index from 2010 to 2017. To test the developed hypotheses, the GLS regression is applied and to control for endogeneity issue and sample selection bias, the authors used, respectively, the two stage least square (2SLS) procedure and the Heckman model.

Findings suggest that a well-balanced board of directors moderates the relationship between the ESG performance and the disclosure quality. The positive effect of abnormal tone management on ESG is weakened by the presence of a good structure of the board, attenuating impression management initiatives.

The research provides evidence of the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting quality, in particular disclosure tone management, on the level of ESG performance in the French context. As the board of directors may have a major impact on weakening impression management strategies in particular tone management practices, in order to improve CSR report quality, the authors recommend French companies to ensure a well-balanced board of directors.

This study helps investors to comprehensively evaluate the information disclosed on CSR reports. It unveils that a strong board composition induces better quality of CSR report and brings better ESG performance. Thus, the study results point to the importance of a well-balanced board of directors and the regulation of the narrative disclosure of CSR information.

This study aims to investigate corporate social responsibility (CSR) as an impression management strategy. It focuses on CSR associated with, both, disclosure tone management (TM) and earnings management (EM) practices to influence stakeholders’ perceptions.

Based on a sample of French listed companies (SBF 120) over an eight-year period, this study empirically investigated a total of 616 firm-year observations. This study firstly investigates the impact of EM and disclosure TM practices on CSR. Then, this study examines their joint effect to explore to which extent CSR is abused for impression management inducement. To address potential endogeneity issue that may be caused by reverse causality between CSR and EM, this study used the two-stage least square.

Multivariate analyses indicate that CSR is positively and significantly influenced by EM, but negatively correlated to disclosure TM. However, results highlight the absence of a significant joint effect of both discretionary practices

Because this study deals only with French companies, results are applicable only to large French firms and should be interpreted with caution. Therefore, future research may need to examine another context.

As CSR may be used for impression management incentives, all actors interested in socially responsible issues have to bring an initiative to prevent the deviation of CSR from moral and ethical standards.

This study sheds light on the impression management strategies used in CSR reporting, so users may have to read between lines. All stakeholders should be more cautious about the reliability of financial and non-financial information and the disclosure tone manipulation practices that may arise in narrative reports.

This research contributes to the debate around CSR from an impression management perspective. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to associate CSR with, both, disclosure TM and EM in a regulated context.

Financial disclosure manipulation is unethical and unlawful because it leads to less transparent reporting and harmful economic decisions based on misleading information. The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary and synthesis of research covering financial disclosure misrepresentation via impression management (IM). Ultimately, this report proposes that virtuous managers may be well-suited to provide transparent, objective disclosure. By extension, virtuous managers may oversee profitable firms and improve capital market efficiency. Suggestions for future research are presented.

This is an academic literature review covering financial disclosure manipulation. The findings are viewed through the lens of Christian virtue ethics (CVE).

IM studies commonly focus on specific methods used to mislead disclosure readers. Antecedent and mitigation strategies are less commonly noted in the research. This paper presents and analyzes IM tools and antecedents. Mitigation approaches are considered through the lens of CVE. This report proposes that virtuous managers may be well-suited to provide transparent, objective disclosure. By extension, virtuous managers may oversee profitable firms and improve capital market efficiency.

This present study focuses on the antecedents of IM in financial disclosures and introduces a novel perspective to financial disclosure mitigation – CVE. Financial disclosure authors and readers, researchers, financial regulators and accounting standards setters may be interested in the findings presented in this study.