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The purpose of this paper is to ascertain whether Fortune Global 500 companies embed stakeholder engagement in their sustainability reporting.

Quantitative and qualitative content analyses were undertaken on 646 sustainability reports written in English over the period from 2015 to 2017.

This research found a low level of stakeholder engagement disclosures and scant evidence that sustainability disclosures were drawn upon stakeholder engagement practices. The findings indicate that stakeholder engagement was loosely embedded in sustainability reporting.

Sustainability reports are the sole unit of analysis. Besides, this research is limited to a sample of companies and to a specific period, which limits the generalisation of the research findings.

Embedding stakeholder engagement in sustainability reporting holds companies accountable to their stakeholders. This is because the companies’ sustainability disclosures acknowledge the stakeholders’ concerns and information about the stakeholder engagement methods deployed to address those concerns.

Stakeholder engagement promotes accountability by encouraging stakeholders to convey their opinions about corporate sustainability, participate in decision-making processes that impact them, and partake in defining the contents of sustainability reports.

This paper provides insights into the need to link sustainability disclosures with stakeholder engagement disclosures, by articulating who the relevant stakeholders are and how they are engaged on the various sustainability topics – rather than conceiving them to be separate and independent disclosures in a sustainability report.

Using the residual dividend theory, this study examines the impact of capital expenditures and working capital on the dividend policies of publicly listed companies in Indonesia.

Using data on public companies (other than those in the financial sector) listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange from 2011 to 2020, this study collected 870 observations (firm-years). This study employs a regression analysis technique using the STATA application program. The main variables in this study are capital expenditure and working capital, and the control variables are sales growth, firm size, leverage, profitability, liquidity and dummy variables for state-owned enterprises. The dependent variable of dividend policy is proxied by the dividend payout ratio.

This study’s results support the residual dividend theory’s hypothesis, in which capital expenditure negatively affects a company’s dividend policy. This study also analyzes this effect on companies that pay cash dividends at quantile positions of 25, 30, 50 and 60. The results show that the effect of capital expenditure on cash dividend payments is more pronounced in the case of companies whose cash dividends are in the 50th quantile. This result holds across different specification and endogeneity tests.

This study analyzes the residual dividend theory in Indonesian companies, focusing on localized factors and investment priorities. It challenges traditional Western dividend policies and provides empirical data that enhances the theory’s robustness. The findings have practical implications for investors, policymakers and corporate decision-makers in the Indonesian market.