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The objective of sustainability assurance (SA) is to give credibility to nonfinancial information (Cheng et al., 2015). In France, certain companies are subject by regulation to the implementation of SA in particular with the transposition of European Directive 2014/95/EU into national law. SA mission is a process by which an independent third-party organization (ITO) assures companies' nonfinancial information. Although this assignment is mostly performed by professional accountants, other providers can perform this assignment (Cohen and Simnett, 2015). In this research, the authors are interested in strategies for legitimizing the SA missions of independent third-party bodies. Assurance providers use their website to promote their missions. How do independent third-party bodies legitimize their assurance mission in a regulatory context relating to European Directive 2014/95/EU?

The authors carried out a discursive analysis of the promotion of SA missions on independent third-party body websites. A content analysis was performed on the collected textual data.

The results highlight different strategies for promoting the implementation of assurance missions aimed at legitimizing their new skills. Nevertheless, it appears that the providers make very little reference to the quality of nonfinancial information as the objective of SA missions.

The research made it possible to study the promotion of SA through the websites of ITOs. Nevertheless, it would have been interesting to be able to question the ITOs to study their perceptions on their new SA missions.

The research enriches the literature on SA, particularly in a regulatory context relating to European Directive 2014/95/EU. It sheds light on the different strategies put in place by the providers appointed by regulations. From a managerial point of view, the study may allow ITOs to adapt their communication to promote extra-financial missions relating to the European Directive and thus to attract new clients. Finally at the institutional and regulatory level, this research highlights the need to put in place a precise framework relating to extra-financial assurance missions. This may also encourage countries not subject to the verification obligation to introduce such an obligation into their national law.

This is the first study to examine the promotion of SA practice by providers. In addition, very few studies have looked at this practice in a regulatory context and in particular within the framework of the European directive.

Financial assurance rules, also known as financial responsibility or bonding requirements, foster cost internalization by requiring potential polluters to demonstrate the financial resources necessary to compensate for environmental damage that may arise in the future. Accordingly, assurance is an important complement to liability rules, restoration obligations, and other regulatory compliance requirements. The paper reviews the need for assurance, given the prevalence of abandoned environmental obligations, and assesses the implementation of assurance rules in the United States. From the standpoint of both legal effectiveness and economic efficiency, assurance rules can be improved. On the whole, however, cost recovery, deterrence, and enforcement are significantly improved by the presence of existing assurance regulations.

The study aims to investigate how hotel booking attributes (i.e. perceived privacy, perceived certification and perceived assurance) engender consumers’ untrust and consequent behavioral intentions (i.e. altruistic behavior and trusting intentions). It also unveils the role of hotel attributes performance as a moderator between hotel booking attributes and consumers’ untrust.

Data were collected through an online platform by engaging 454 Chinese respondents. SPSS 25.0 and AMOS 24.0 (structural equation modeling) were used for data analysis and interpretation.

Results demonstrate that hotel booking attributes positively substantiate consumers’ untrust which, in turn, develops altruistic behavior and negative trusting intentions. Moreover, hotel attribute experience significantly moderates the relationships between perceived privacy, perceived certification and consumers’ untrust. Notably, hotel attribute performance insignificantly influences the association between perceived assurance and untrust.

This study used the Chinese context and examined Chinese domestic travelers and the nonbranded hotel industry. Notwithstanding its limitations, the findings help hospitality and tourism firms, en bloc, to manage their review websites by explicitly disclosing policies regarding customers’ privacy and assurance, winning their trust through third-party certification and employing data scientists to develop algorithms to sieve fake information proactively.

This study develops an original conceptual framework by using the untrust model in this research. Our findings add to the research on consumer behavior, information processing, service management and trust and suggest practical implications for hospitality firms.

The authors aims to examine, first, what factors appear to lead those US companies that do obtain assurance on their CSR reports to do so, and second, whether this assurance appears to be valued by market participants.

The authors use logistic regression analysis to determine what factors explain the choice to seek assurance. For the second stage of the analysis, the authors rely on Aboody et al.'s market valuation model to examine the association between CSR report assurance and firm value.

The authors find that industry membership and disclosure extensiveness both appear to influence the choice to attain third-party assurance on CSR reports in the USA. However, the results also indicate that the assurance is not associated with higher market value for report-issuing companies.

The authors examine only large firms and limit the investigation to a single year. Further, the authors do not examine market valuation effects where a broader stakeholder orientation might influence these relations.

The results suggest that improving the incidence of CSR report attestation in the USA may require efforts from the assurance community to better identify the potential benefits of the practice.

This is the first study to focus on CSR report assurance in a setting where country-level influences appear to limit adoption of the practice. As such, the findings are potentially important for understanding both the low incidence of assurance and what might be necessary to increase its use.

This paper aims to verify whether the legitimate pressure of external forces on heavily polluting firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR)-related behaviors affect firms’ assurance strategy in the Chinese context. The authors argue that, under external pressure, as a source of legitimacy, the assurance over CSR reports allows the business behaviors of heavy polluters to be recognized by society.

This paper sampled listed heavy polluters in China from 2011 to 2018 and used the multiperiod logit model to examine the effects of external corporate governance on firms’ assurance decisions. Principal component analysis methods were used to construct a comprehensive framework of external corporate governance. The indicators were obtained from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research databases, the NERI Report and the China Urban Statistical Yearbook.

This paper confirms that external corporate governance positively affects firms’ assurance decisions, and good financial conditions, well-governed internal controls and sufficient government subsidies positively moderate this effect.

The findings provide feasible ways to encourage firms’ high-quality corporate environmental information disclosure, thus providing valuable guidance for policymakers and other stakeholders to effectively supervise firms’ CSR behaviors.

The findings are of great importance in encouraging high-quality corporate environmental information disclosures, improving the support of capital markets among developing countries and drawing social attention to the environmental protection and social responsibility of heavy polluters.

The research extends the current research in the field of social environmental accounting by using legitimacy theory to explain firms’ assurance motivations. Additionally, this paper focuses on the practices of assurance services in the emerging economy and provides suggestions for developing assurance over CSR reports.

Credibility concerns regarding integrated reports can harm the intended decrease of information asymmetry between a firm and its investors. Therefore, it is crucial to examine whether voluntary third-party assurance enhances the credibility of integrated reports and, thus, decreases information asymmetry. Furthermore, this study aims to investigate the interaction effect between assurance quality and the disclosed connectivity of the capitals, a distinguishing feature of integrated reports.

Content analysis is performed of the 176 assurance statements included in the 269 integrated reports of Forbes Global 2000 firms disclosed from 2013 to 2015 and the 269 integrated reports themselves. Regression analyzes are applied to examine the associations between assurance, the disclosed connectivity of the capitals and information asymmetry.

The presence of an assurance statement in an integrated report significantly decreases information asymmetry. Surprisingly, assurance quality is not significantly associated with information asymmetry. However, an interaction analysis reveals that combining high assurance quality with high disclosed connectivity of the capitals allows a significant decrease in information asymmetry.

The paper demonstrates that the connectivity of the capitals of integrated reports and assurance quality are connected and together are associated with information asymmetry.

The results imply, both for report preparers and standard setters, that assurance quality is advantageous only when combined with disclosed connectivity of the capitals.

More information on non-financial information measured by the connectivity of the capitals of integrated reporting has an interaction effect together with assurance quality on information asymmetry.

This paper builds on a unique data set derived from the contents of integrated reports and accompanying assurance statements. Furthermore, it extends the integrated reporting literature by investigating the interaction between assurance quality and the disclosed connectivity of the capitals, which had not previously been examined in combination.

Because corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports in China are surging in quantity but are low in quality, impression management in CSR reports has become a hot research topic in recent years. This paper aims to research whether and how media coverage affects CSR report impression management and whether CSR report disclosure attributes have different regulating effects.

Based on the effective supervision hypothesis and the market pressure hypothesis, this study uses Heckman’s two-stage regression model to examine the effect of media coverage on CSR report impression management from the perspective of managers’ self-interest.

The results support the market pressure hypothesis, which suggest that firms with higher levels of media coverage are more likely to engage in CSR report impression management, and this effect is especially significant in firms with a higher proportion of institutional investor shareholding and more analysts tracking. Further cross-sectional group studies show that market pressure is only present in firms whose CSR reports are subject to mandatory disclosure without third-party assurance or policy-oriented media attention.

This paper does not consider the attention of other forms of media. The findings of this paper has policy implications for a better understanding of the motivation underlying impression management in CSR reports, encouraging voluntary disclosure and assurance to relieve the market pressure from media coverage.

From the perspective impression management of social responsibility report, further understanding the governance role of media coverage. A large number of previous literatures have shown that media coverage has a good supervisory role, but these studies mainly focus on the financial level of enterprises. Media coverage seems to be a “double-edged sword”. While it plays a supervisory role and inhibits earnings management or irregularities at the financial level, it also brings enormous market pressure to the enterprises, which is reflected in the increase of impression management behavior of social responsibility reports at the non-financial level, and this pressure is probably caused by the financial level.

Voluntary disclosure and verification of social responsibility reports, as an important mechanism to improve the quality of social responsibility reports, supports the correctness, scientificity and rationality of the current policies of the SFC and the exchange on encouraging voluntary disclosure and verification. In the future, changing regulatory thinking, encouraging voluntary disclosure of social responsibility reports and introducing more independent and authoritative certification agencies should be the direction and focus of policy-making, so that social responsibility reports can play a better role in helping investors make decisions.

From the perspective of impression management of CSR reports, this paper provides evidence regarding the effect of media coverage and its transmission mechanisms. This paper uses China's unique institutional environments to study the impact of different types of media coverage on impression management in CSR reports in emerging market economy. Different from the institutional environment of developed countries such as the USA, mandatory disclosure and voluntary disclosure coexist in CSR reporting in China. The authors provide critical evidence to show that third-party assurance and voluntary disclosure improves the quality of CSR reports.

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This study investigates CSR reporting’s role in debt access and cost of debt with the moderating role of external assurance and GRI adoption in emerging markets. Such an investigation will help facilitate external fund flow to firms in better terms.

We collected data from 16 emerging markets between 2008 and 2019 from the Thomson Reuters Eikon and ran fixed effects regression analysis and robustness tests by addressing endogeneity concerns, adopting alternative sample and integrating additional control variables.

The results show that CSR reporting has a positive association with access to debt and a negative association with the cost of debt. Furthermore, both external assurance and GRI adoption do not significantly moderate between CSR reporting and access to debt and cost of debt. Hence, creditors in emerging markets are not interested in CSR report assurance and GRI framework adoption and do not integrate them into their lending decisions.

Emerging markets are unique settings characterized by high growth rates, limited capital availability, high debt costs and weak institutional environments. Thus, reaching debt with convenient conditions is critical for emerging market firms to finance their growth. Hence, our study will help emerging market firms reach external funding more easily and in better terms via CSR transparency. Besides, our investigation is based on a broad sample of emerging markets, and hence updates prior emerging market studies conducted in single-country settings. Lastly, we test the complementarity of third-party assurance and GRI adoption to CSR reporting in loan contracting.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of the choice of an assurance service provider on financial and social performance in an emerging economy. The study also examines whether the chief executive officer’s (CEO) characteristics influence the choice of an assurance service provider.

This study uses descriptive statistics, ordinary least square and probit regression to examine the 800 firm-year observations for the period 2010–2019 and with the Indian stock market as a testing ground.

The study shows that the engagement of assurance service providers reduces financial performance (stock price returns and Tobin’s q). The study also shows that consulting firms and auditing firms improve the social performance disclosure of the firm in an emerging economy. However, consulting firms outweigh auditing firms in improving social performance disclosure. Also, the implementation of mandatory reporting may slightly impede instead of an increase in social performance disclosure in an emerging economy. The study also shows that ageing CEOs prefer consulting firms over auditing firms in assurance service provision. Finally, the study shows that an extended stay in office by a CEO improves the choice of consulting firms, but the effect has a near-neutral significance.

The choice of CEO characteristics as an independent variable adds to the factors or drivers that cause the choice of an assurance service provider in an emerging economy. Also, the measurement variable of stock price returns and Tobin’s q expands the financial performance measurement in the relationship with assurance service providers.