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This paper aims to examine whether tax disclosure in Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)-based sustainability reporting mitigates aggressive tax avoidance.

This study uses a multiple regression method for 714 nonspecially taxed firms listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange in 2014–2018.

The findings demonstrate that disclosing tax payments in GRI-based sustainability reports reduces aggressive tax avoidance. Additional analysis indicates that the number of GRI-based sustainability reports positively affects aggressive tax avoidance. However, disclosing tax payments in multiple GRI-based sustainability reports negatively affects aggressive tax avoidance.

Recent prior studies demonstrate that aggressive tax avoidance does not indicate an organizational culture that devalues corporate social responsibility. This paper argues that firms cannot find the link between tax and corporate social responsibility when tax payments are not incorporated in sustainability reports. GRI considers tax a sustainability issue and seeks to institutionalize this concept by recommending that firms disclose taxes in their sustainability reports. This research analyses whether disclosing taxes in GRI-based sustainability reports may serve as a form of soft law by convincing firms that tax is a sustainability issue, thereby reducing their tax avoidance. This topic has received little attention in previous research.

This study aims to investigate the equity market reaction to sustainability disclosure measures derived from firms' inaugural sustainability reports following the implementation of mandatory sustainability reporting in Singapore.

This study explores the equity market reaction to first-time sustainability reports of mandatory adopters and compares the reactions between voluntary and mandatory adopters. To mitigate any imbalanced distribution effects, entropy balancing techniques are employed.

The author observes a significant equity market reaction when mandatory adopters adhere to a reporting framework and release sustainability reports as standalone documents. Additionally, the study indicates that government regulation amplifies the equity market reaction for companies that include a board statement within their sustainability reports and present them as standalone publications.

The lack of quantitative information disclosed in the first-time sustainability reports may restrict the generalizability of the findings.

The findings provide valuable insights for organizations and managers to evaluate the market's response to sustainability disclosures and improve communication effectiveness with investors. Furthermore, the study has direct policy implications for global standard-setting organizations in sustainability reporting. The findings support the notion that investors value market-led and investor-focused sustainability disclosures.

The study contributes to the limited body of research that examines the capital market effects of mandatory sustainability disclosures. To the author’s knowledge, this is among a few studies to directly investigate the equity market reaction to mandatory sustainability disclosures at the firm level.

This paper aims to contribute to existing academic work and business practice by presenting original empirical findings and by providing insights into priority setting on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in organizations. From an academic viewpoint, it not only adds to previous work on the topic of SDG materiality (e.g. Van Tulder and Lucht, 2019) but also aims to contribute new insights into the steps that are crucial and influence the adoption of the SDGs in materiality assessments. It may also add to the literature by providing new knowledge on the strategic considerations that organizations may make and institutional dynamics that encourage organizations to implement the SDG materiality method.

By executing a national survey research in Belgium through a collaboration between academics of Antwerp Management School, Louvain School of Management (UCLouvain) and the University of Antwerp, and supported by Belgium’s Federal Institute of Sustainable Development, the authors have obtained several insights into the SDG landscape in Belgium for various types of organizations, including companies, governmental and nongovernmental organizations and educational institutions. This research builds further on a first national survey (SDG Barometer Belgium, 2018) on the adoption and implementation of the SDGs. However, an important aim of this research is to shift the emphasis to more prominent new elements, such as whether or not organizations use the SDGs in materiality assessments. While the main part of the data for this research were collected through an online questionnaire, document analyses were conducted based on the sustainability reports of BEL 20 companies, the benchmark stock market index of Euronext Brussels consisting of 20 companies traded at the Brussels Stock Exchange, and seven interviews were held to obtain additional insights.

A total of 386 organizations across sectors responded to the question “Does your organization perform a materiality analysis”, of which 210 organizations completed the question “Does your organization align the materiality analysis with the SDGs,”after an “exit route” based on a positive answer to the first question. When diving into the survey results, the authors see that no more than 12% of the 210 organizations performing a materiality analysis align their materiality analysis with the SDGs, while 14% indicate that they do not account for the SDGs at all in their materiality analyses. The results show that 41% of the organizations take into account the SDGs to a certain degree when performing their materiality analysis. Speculating on an explanation for these results, it may be the case that organizations do not yet think about coupling the SDGs to their materiality assessment, experience difficulties in practice or generally lack the knowledge for relating the SDGs to the sustainability topics that are relevant to them. This seems in line with other research (e.g. Van Tulder and Lucht, 2019), as the results of this study indicate that it seems to be difficult for organizations to relate the SDGs to the existing sustainability priorities or materiality analyses of companies.

The real contribution of this paper essentially lies in the description of the Janssen Pharmaceuticals case. The company recognized that today’s internally focused approach to goal setting is not enough to address global challenges. Hence, looking at what is needed externally from a global perspective, taking into account sustainability thresholds and setting ambitions accordingly, is needed to bridge the gap between current performance and required performance. From the Janssen Pharmaceuticals case, the authors learned that external stakeholders are an extremely useful source of information to address the required performance by using the SDG framework. For sure, SDG materiality analyses are still in an early phase of development and knowledge on how to conduct such an analysis may be lacking. Future efforts – or the lack thereof – may indicate whether or not companies consider such analyses as sufficiently relevant. Although the uptake of the SDGs is in progress, it remains to be seen which, if any, materiality method will eventually turn out as a new dominant way of defining material issues. The findings presented in this study hopefully serve as a basis for further investigation of the topic.

This paper aims to elucidate responsible leadership as a construct with strong moral and ethical underpinnings, as well as a focus on multiple stakeholders and the triple bottom line. This paper also highlights the interdependence of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of a business to achieve corporate sustainability.

This conceptual paper is the outcome of analysing and synthesizing the findings of the literature review on three main constructs: responsible leadership, triple bottom line and corporate sustainability. This review enabled the development of logical associations among these constructs.

The literature revealed logical associations between responsible leadership, the triple bottom line and corporate sustainability. All three constructs embody the three dimensions of economic, social and environmental sustainability, which form the basis of the associations.

Responsible leadership, grounded in stakeholder theory, goes beyond the traditional dyadic leader–follower relationship to influence multiple stakeholders within and outside the organization and achieve positive outcomes for both the organization and society. Multiple levels of outcomes and higher levels of organizational performance for businesses are the hallmarks of responsible leadership.

This paper highlights the importance of responsible leadership and triple bottom-line performance for corporate sustainability. Responsible leadership has the potential to create significant impact on business and society, to achieve long-term corporate sustainability. A conceptual model of responsible leadership is also proposed to show the association between responsible leadership, the triple bottom line and corporate sustainability.

This paper aims to investigate the moderating effect of sustainability reporting on the relationship between the independent variables of board diversity, and earnings management and the dependent variable of readability of financial statements.

The study panel data regression analysis involved 36 Kenyan-listed companies from 2016 to 2020.

Key findings were that increased board diversity was found to significantly improve the readability of financial statements. Discretionary earnings management was found to significantly reduce the readability of financial statements. Sustainability reporting was found to significantly increase the readability of financial statements, and it moderated the relationship between board diversity, earnings management and financial statements readability in Kenya.

The study sample of 36 non-financial listed in the Nairobi Securities Exchange was very small and was affected by the problem of thin trading; hence, caution should be adopted when interpreting the findings.

The Capital Markets Authorities (CMA) as a policymaker should enforce sustainability reporting by Kenyan listed firms as there is evidence that the reporting enhances the readability of financial statements. The Institute of Certified Public Accountants as a policymaker should closely monitor the published financial statements of firms for earnings management and punish the perpetrators, as there is empirical evidence that the practice reduces the readability of financial statements.

Sustainability reporting is successful as a moderating variable between readability of financial statements and determinants of readability of financial statements.

This study contributes to knowledge by studying sustainability reporting as a moderating variable between the independent variables of board diversity and earnings management and the dependent variable of readability of financial statements and measured sustainability reporting using a dummy variable for the period before and after the enactment and release of CMA code of 2016 on corporate governance that required sustainability reporting by Kenyan listed companies.

The paper aims to carry out a comprehensive literature mapping to synthesise and descriptively analyse the research trends of biodiversity accounting, providing implications for managers and policymakers, whilst also outlining a future agenda for scholars.

A bibliometric analysis is carried out by adopting the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses protocol for searching and selecting the scientific contributions to be analysed. Citation analysis is used to map a current research front and a bibliographic coupling is conducted to detect the connection networks in current literature.

Biodiversity accounting is articulated in five thematic clusters (sub-areas), such as “Natural resource management”, “Biodiversity economic evaluation”, “Natural capital accounting”, “Biodiversity accountability” and “Biodiversity disclosure and reporting”. Critical insights emerge from the content analysis of these sub-areas.

The analysis of the thematic evolution of the biodiversity accounting literature provides useful insights to inform both practice and research and infer implications for managers, policymakers and scholars by outlining three main areas of intervention, i.e. adjusting evaluation tools, integrating ecological knowledge and establishing corporate social legitimacy.

Currently, the level of biodiversity reporting is pitifully low. Therefore, organisations should properly manage biodiversity by integrating diverse and sometimes competing forms of knowledge for the stable and resilient flow of ecosystem services for future generations.

This paper not only updates and enriches the current state of the art but also identifies five thematic areas of the biodiversity accounting literature for theoretical and practical considerations.

This study aims to investigate whether social reputation via corporate social responsibility (CSR) awarding facilitates access to debt and decreases the cost of debt and whether governance mechanisms moderate this relationship.

The sample covers the period between 2002 and 2021, during which CSR award data were available in the Thomson Reuters Eikon/Refinitiv database. The empirical models are based on country, industry and year fixed-effects regression.

While the main findings produced an insignificant result for access to debt, they indicated strong evidence for the positive relationship between CSR awarding and the cost of debt. Moreover, the moderating effect highlights that while the sustainability committee helps CSR-awarded companies access debt more easily, independent directors help firms decrease the cost of debt via CSR awarding. Furthermore, the results differ between the US and the non-US samples, earlier and recent periods, high- and low-leverage firms and large and small firms.

For the first time, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the authors assess whether social reputation via CSR awarding facilitates access to debt and decreases the cost of debt in an international and cross-industry sample. Little is known about the effect of social reputation on loan contracting, although social reputation conveys broader information that goes beyond the firm’s internal (performance) and external (reporting) CSR practices. The authors also draw attention to the differing roles of distinct governance mechanisms in leveraging social reputation for loan contracting.

Going beyond the traditional approach of formal and informal institutions as antecedents of entrepreneurship (directly) and development (indirectly), this paper seeks to explore knowledge institutions as a necessary input for entrepreneurship and the development of societies.

Institutional economics lenses are utilized to observe other factors (e.g. the number of R&D staff and researchers from the public sector) that involve laws and socialization processes, which at the same time create knowledge useful for entrepreneurs and society. These ideas are tested through a sample of 281 observations from 17 autonomous communities and two autonomous cities in Spain. The information coming from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), Ministry of Economics, Industry, and Competitiveness, and INE (Instituto Nacional de Estadística), was analyzed through 3SLS, which is useful for a simultaneous equation strategy.

Knowledge institutions such as the number of R&D staff and researchers from the public sector are found positively associated with entrepreneurship, which is a factor directly and positively linked to economic development across Spanish regions.

The findings help the operationalization of other institutions considered in institutional economics theory and its application to entrepreneurship research. Moreover, the results bring new insights into the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship in the public sector, in which the institutional analysis is implicit.

This study aims to examine the impact of board characteristics on climate change disclosures (CCDs) in the context of an emerging economy, with a unique focus on regulatory influences.

This study analyzes longitudinal data (2014–2021) from environmentally sensitive firms listed on the Dhaka Stock Exchange, using a disclosure index developed within the Global Reporting Initiative framework. The authors use a neo-institutional theoretical lens to explore regulatory influences on CCD through board characteristics. This study uses hand-collected data from annual reports owing to the absence of an established database.

The results indicate that a larger board size, the presence of foreign directors and the existence of an audit committee correlate with higher levels of CCD disclosure. Conversely, a higher frequency of board meetings is associated with lower CCD disclosure levels. This study also observed an increase in CCD following the implementation of corporate governance guidelines by the Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission, albeit with a relatively low number of firms making these disclosures.

This study contributes to the climate change reporting literature by providing empirical evidence of regulatory influences on CCD through board characteristics in an emerging economy. However, the findings may not be universally applicable, considering the study’s focus on Bangladeshi listed firms.

This study suggests growing pressures for diverse stakeholders, including researchers and regulatory bodies, to integrate climate change disclosure into routine activities. This study offers a valuable framework and insights for various stakeholders.

By emphasizing the influence of good governance and sustainability practices, this study contributes to stakeholders’ understanding, aiming to contribute to a better world.

This study stands out by uniquely positioning itself in the climate change reporting literature, shedding light on regulatory influences on CCD through board characteristics in the context of an emerging economy.

This study aims to analyze the relationship between Islamic governance (IG) and leverage and examine the interaction of corporate social responsibility disclosure (CSRD) in the relationship between IG and leverage.

This study used 444 observational data comprising Asian, European and African Islamic banks (IBs) and analyzed using the regression analysis method to answer the research hypothesis.

This study finds that IG had a significant positive effect on leverage, indicating that it can increase the leverage of IBs. In other words, IG boosts the public confidence to entrust their funds to IBs through current accounts and savings. However, this study shows that CSRD weakens the relationship between IG and leverage. In addition, this study includes the control variables of board size, Islamic supervisory board size and company size, where all three variables showed their effect on leverage. These results were obtained through additional analysis by categorizing our sample based on CSRD.

The results of this study show that IG significantly positively affects IB leverage globally. This can be used as a basis for policymakers to include the ICG variable in analyzing IBs leverage. The weakness of this study is the use of IG variables based on disclosure so that IG components that affect leverage cannot be analyzed accurately. Future research can use the IG variable by using specific IG component values such as the number of meetings, member attendance and remuneration of SSB members in analyzing IB leverage globally.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first study to discuss the interaction of CSRD with IG on leverage in Islamic banking in Asia, Europe and Africa, thus adding to the existing literature on Islamic banking.