Search results

Various federal agencies have acknowledged that they would take voluntary disclosure of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) misconduct into account in assessing a transgressing company’s fines. However, several scholars questioned whether companies would actually receive that benefit. Previous research yielded the answer that companies do not get any benefit from voluntarily disclosing. The current study aims to revisit this area.

The present study uses a census approach where all FCPA cases will be analyzed. The present study also uses added control variables and different statistical approaches in an effort to answer the question of whether there is a benefit to voluntary disclosure.

The results here contradict previous findings and show that companies do actually receive a benefit to voluntary disclosure when the bribe promised or paid is under a certain amount. Once the bribe paid or promised surpasses this amount, the benefit to voluntary disclosure ceases.

Findings provide insight to companies facing possible FCPA violations.

Only one author attempted to answer the question of whether there was a benefit to voluntary disclosure. However, a subsequent study illuminated several flaws within that previous research. The current study is the first to provide a substantial answer to the question.

This paper aims to investigate the implications of governance quality on a firm’s information environment in the context of voluntary changes in hedging disclosures made by oil and gas companies.

The research utilizes a Factiva-guided search to hand-collect public disclosures related to changes in hedging policies along with the hand collection of financial derivatives positions and operational hedging contracts data using 10-K filings. The paper addresses self-selection bias, which typically plagues voluntary disclosure studies, by implementing a Heckman (1979) two-step model to estimate the decision process, make changes in their hedge program and, conditional on making changes to their hedging activities, provide disclosure.

Oil and gas firms with relatively poor governance are more likely to voluntarily disclose hedging changes and do so more frequently (substitution hypothesis). There is evidence that poorly governed firms in the presence of large shareholders (i.e. high institutional ownership) are more likely to provide transparency of hedging policy changes.

This is the first study to combine hand-collected changes in hedging voluntary disclosures and hand-collected derivative position data to investigate the interaction of corporate governance and voluntary disclosure. The sample allows for analysis between three sub-samples: companies that do not make changes in hedging and do not hedge, firms that make changes in their hedging policies but do not disclose the changes during a given year and companies that change their hedging activities and provide voluntary disclosure. This unique setting helps to alleviate concerns of self-selection bias associated with voluntary disclosure.

This study examines the impact of expanded geographical disclosures on nonprofessional investor judgments. Public country-by-country reporting (CBCR) is a way to increase corporate transparency, enhancing tax fairness and accountability (European Commission, 2016). Public disclosure would make large multinational companies share information about profits, taxes paid, and number of employees on a per-country basis. However, it is unclear whether nonprofessional investors would even use CBCR and how they would interpret the information. Adding to the policy debate on whether publicly available country-by-country information will be properly used, this study employs an experimental design to investigate the effect of disclosure availability and content on nonprofessional investor judgments. We find that participants receiving an expanded disclosure are able to more accurately assess the state of the social contract between the organization and society, imposing sanctions if necessary. Exploring CBCR provides timely evidence to regulators, standard setters, and tax fairness campaigners on the impact of expanded geographical disclosures as a means of increasing transparency and improving competitiveness.

This paper aims to unite firm- and country-level drivers of the disclosure of integrated reports. It creates a synopsis of voluntary disclosure, signaling, proprietary cost, legitimacy, stakeholder and institutional theory.

The empirical analyses build on a logistic regression model examining the disclosure decisions for integrated reports published between 2012 and 2016 by the 2,000 largest listed companies worldwide.

The results indicate that the disclosure of integrated reports by large listed companies is explained in parallel by multiple theories, operationalized by the firm-level characteristics of lower profitability, a higher market-to-book value, lower leverage, lower level of industry concentration and higher social performance. Additionally, the country-level characteristics of civil law setting and lower investor protection, lower power distance and lower masculinity coincide with the disclosure of integrated reports.

The inferences emphasize that a single theoretical framework cannot explain the decision to disclose an integrated report. Rather, a set of economic firm characteristics may lead to different disclosure decisions in different socio-economic and institutional environments.

This study aims to examine the reaction of stakeholders (i.e. capital providers) to climate-related corporate reporting. Climate-related corporate reporting is captured by the level of voluntary carbon disclosure, while the recognition and appreciation of capital providers are captured through the cost of equity capital (COE).

This study uses a sample including the 350 largest companies by market capitalization on the London Stock Exchange, UK (FTSE350) from 2015 to 2019. The authors use fixed-effects regression models to examine the effect of climate-related corporate reporting on the COE.

This study finds that voluntary carbon disclosure proxied by carbon disclosure score is negatively associated with COE. This suggests that firms’ superior quality disclosure of carbon information could contribute to a lower COE. This implies that the market and stakeholders positively appreciate the involvement in climate-related reporting by businesses.

The finding provides insights to regulators, investors and other stakeholders in terms of the positive economic implication of actively engaging in reducing climate change impact through voluntary carbon disclosure. These findings also motivate corporates to be proactively involved in climate-related reporting by extending the quality of carbon information disclosure.

Integrated reporting (IR) aims to provide disclosures of the connectivity of non-financial and financial value creation aspects. These disclosures are defined as the disclosed connectivity of the capitals resulting from integrated thinking. This paper aims to investigate the extent of disclosed connectivity of the capitals in integrated reports and its underlying managerial discretion by drawing on economic-based theories.

Regression analyses are applied to examine the associations between economic firm-level characteristics and the extent of disclosed connectivity of the capitals. The analyses are based on a content analysis of 169 integrated reports disclosed in 2013 and 2014 by Forbes Global 2000 companies.

This paper finds high heterogeneity in the extent of disclosed connectivity of the capitals in current IR practice. This heterogeneity is related to drivers arising from economic-based theories. Firms’ non-financial and financial performance and the importance of strategic shareholders and debt providers are positively associated with the extent of disclosed connectivity of the capitals. The complexity of the business model and a highly competitive environment are negatively associated with the extent of disclosed connectivity of the capitals.

This paper extends qualitative IR studies on the disclosed connectivity of the capitals by quantitative results from a content analysis for a cross-sectional and global sample. Additionally, this study adds to prior IR literature on the drivers of the binary decision to disclose an integrated report by focusing on the extent of disclosed connectivity of the capitals.

For report preparers, users and standard setters, the results reveal that perceived cost-benefit considerations (signaling vs. direct and proprietary costs) may explain managerial discretion regarding the connectivity of the capitals within integrated reports.

This paper examines integrated reports, which are intended to inform providers of financial capital and other stakeholders about the connectivity of the six capitals of the IR framework.

This paper develops a metric disclosure measure of the extent of disclosed connectivity of the capitals. It provides initial evidence of how the IR framework’s focus on this key characteristic is realized in disclosure practice. Concerns about competitive disadvantages and preparation costs limit this key characteristic of integrated reports.

This study examines the extent and nature of voluntary intellectual capital (IC) disclosure by public‐listed companies in Malaysia and how the disclosure may be explained by the economics or other rationale of corporate disclosure. Those intangible assets that are required to be disclosed under the extant accounting standards were specifically excluded from this study. The top 30 and the bottom 30 companies were selected from the list of top 100 largest public‐listed companies by market capitalization at the end of 2003. Content analysis was used to measure the extent of voluntary IC disclosure in the 2003 annual reports of the selected companies. This study found that the voluntary disclosure of IC information is generally not extensive among the publiclisted companies in Malaysia and narrative description of their IC attributes is the most often adopted format. The findings suggest that the IC disclosure behaviour of the sample companies may be explained based on both economic and non‐economic rationale. Implications of the findings are discussed.

The corporate disclosure decision is one of the most difficult decisions any corporation, its management and counsel will face. If a corporation learns that it or one of its employees has engaged in a fraud or crime, the corporation, through its officers and directors, must decide whether it should disclose the fraud or crime to the government and, if the decision to disclose is made, what the scope of the disclosure should be. These decisions are fraught with dangers which threaten to expose the corporation and its employees to civil and criminal liability.

The purpose of this study is to examine whether the level of voluntary disclosure affects firm value in the Chinese capital market. It also investigates whether voluntary disclosure and the values of Chinese firms are influenced by the global financial crisis (GFC).

The study used a sample of 714 firm‐year annual reports of listed companies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchanges over a period of five years from 2005 to 2009 and adopt a two‐stage OLS (2SLS) procedure.

It is found that the extent of voluntary disclosure has improved in China during the period studied. The multiple regression results indicate that more voluntary disclosure does not create value for Chinese firms. It is also observed that multinational ownership, non‐executive directors, and audit committee presence are positively and significantly associated with voluntary disclosure. Furthermore, the study reports that state and individual ownerships are negatively associated with firm value while multinational ownership and liquidity have a positive significant association with firm value. During the financial crisis, voluntary disclosure continues to increase, however, firm value has decreased.

Using data from the Chinese market, the study fills a research gap by examining the value relevance of voluntary disclosure and tests whether the Global Financial Crisis has influenced voluntary disclosure levels and Chinese firms' values.

The purpose of this paper is to examine factors affecting fundraisers’ voluntary information disclosure on crowdfunding platforms based on risk-perception theory (RPT).

Structural equation modeling was employed to test the hypothesized relationships using data collected from China.

The authors found that plagiarism risk and financing risk are two important variables that influence fundraisers’ voluntary information disclosure. Specifically, plagiarism risk has a negative effect on fundraisers’ voluntary information disclosure, while financing risk has a positive effect on fundraisers’ voluntary information disclosure. Plagiarism risk is affected by information concerns, perceived control, project innovativeness, and quality of alternatives, while financing risk is affected by protection policy and information norms.

This study enriches crowdfunding research by identifying factors influencing fundraisers’ voluntary information disclosure and contributes to RPT by applying it in a new crowdfunding context.