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This study aims to investigate the quality of disclosure of a cutting-edge reporting tool – integrated reporting (<IR>) – in terms of its effectiveness to report on COVID-19 pandemic information, its ability to provide forward-looking information and risk impact implications, and its quality determinants in challenging times.

Thanks to a content analysis of 247 <IR> for FY20, an integrated reporting disclosure score was developed to assess the disclosure quality provided by the sampled companies. Three research questions were tested through logistic regressions.

Non-financial disclosure activities struggle to provide adequate information in terms of potential future scenarios, risk assessment and forward-looking analyses. However, companies incorporated in “Anglo-Saxon” territories drafted integrated reports of higher quality. More recently, incorporated companies have made a greater effort to measure and report COVID-19 pandemic impacts on environmental, social and governance and business activities, also increasing their risk assessment and mitigation efforts. Concerning the determinants of disclosure quality, leverage, corporate governance structures, country of incorporation and belonging to “high impact” industries all lead to a higher quality of <IR> disclosure.

Examining in detail corporate social responsibility activities and corporate governance integrity is pivotal to orienting strategy towards sustainable trajectories: to do so, corporate reporting and disclosure practices are essential tools. In this context, corporate governance systems that emphasize board diversity are proven, even in disruptive circumstances, to play a crucial role in providing corporate reports of higher quality. High disclosure quality that goes beyond mere financial results is considered to be necessary to remain competitive strategically, socially and environmentally.

This study aims to evaluate the adequacy of climate risk disclosure by providing empirical evidence on whether corporate disclosure meets rising stakeholders’ demand for risk disclosure concerning climate change.

Drawing on a triangulated approach for collecting data from multiple sources in a longitudinal study, we perform a panel regression analysis on a sample of multinational firms between 2007 and 2021. Inspired by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) principles, our innovative and inclusive model of measuring firm-level climate risks underscores the urgent need to redefine materiality from a broader value creation (rather than only financial) perspective, including the impact on sustainable development.

The findings of this study provide evidence of limited corporate climate risk disclosure, indicating that organisations have yet to accept the reality of climate-related risks. An additional finding supports the existence of a nexus between higher corporate environmental disclosure and higher corporate resilience to material financial and environmental risks, rather than pervasive sustainability risk disclosure.

We argue that a mechanical process for climate-related risk disclosure can limit related disclosure variability, risk reporting priority selection, thereby broadening the short-term perspective on financial materiality assessment for disclosure.

This study extends recent literature on the adequacy of corporate risk disclosure, highlighting the importance of disclosing material sustainability risks from the perspectives of different stakeholder groups for long-term success. Corporate management should place climate-related risks at the centre of their disclosure strategies. We argue that reducing the systematic underestimation of climate-related risks and variations in their disclosure practices may require regulations that enhance corporate perceptions and responses to these risks.

This study emphasises the importance of reconceptualising materiality from a multidimensional value creation standpoint, encapsulating financial and sustainable development considerations. This novel model of assessing firm-level climate risk, based on the GRI principles, underscores the necessity of developing a more comprehensive approach to evaluating materiality.

Corporate disclosures are essential because they provide transparent and accurate information about a company's financial health, performance, risks and governance practices. They enable investors to make informed decisions, promote market efficiency and maintain trust in the financial system. This paper uses bibliometrics to identify the intellectual composition of the literature on corporate disclosure.

Based on the bibliometric information of 4,551 articles on corporate disclosure research, the authors conducted citation, keyword co-occurrence, bibliographic coupling and publication analyses to elucidate the leading articles, authors, sources, institutions, countries, themes and topics in the field of corporate disclosure from the 1960s to 2021.

The findings of this review demonstrate that corporate disclosure research is based on four broad themes – the role of disclosure in capital markets, non-financial disclosure, determinants of corporate disclosure and firm risk and intellectual capital disclosure. This review suggests that management should pay attention to the financial and non-financial corporate information that investors, regulators and the government emphasise.

This paper is the first comprehensive bibliometric review on corporate disclosure. It summarises the regulatory shifts, technological changes and industry trends that have influenced corporate disclosure research. Besides identifying broad research themes, the authors performed bibliographic coupling for research on disclosure sources, including annual reports, management forecasts, earnings calls, press releases, the Internet and social media, to reveal the thematic clusters related to these sources.

The aim of this study is to measure the risk disclosure level and to determine the relationship between ownership structure dimensions (institutional ownership, foreign ownership and family ownership) and corporate risk disclosure in Jordan.

This study used a sample of 94 Jordanian listed firms from the Amman Stock Exchange for the period from 2014 to 2017. This study measured risk disclosure using the number of risk-related sentences in the annual report, while random effects regression was used for hypotheses testing.

The results revealed that family ownership has a negative effect on risk disclosure practices, but institutional ownership, foreign ownership, firm size and leverage have no significant effect on the risk disclosure level.

The finding of this study is more likely be useful for many concerned parties, researchers, authorities, investors and financial analysts alike in understanding the current practices of the risk disclosure in Jordan, thus helping them in reconsidering and reviewing the accounting standards and improving the credibility and transparency of the financial reports in the Jordanian capital market.

This study offers novel evidence detailing the impact of ownership structure toward corporate risk disclosure, its implementation in emerging markets following the minimal amount of scholarly efforts on the topic. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first examination of the impact of ownership structure on corporate risk disclosure. Thus, this study has important implications for the decisions of executives, policymakers, shareholders and lenders, as it enables them to better understand the linkage between ownership structure on corporate risk disclosure.

This study aims to explore the quality of corporate governance disclosure under an “apply and explain” regime in the context of an emerging economy (Mauritius), following a transition from the traditional “comply or explain” approach within the national code of corporate governance.

The research relies on a content analysis of corporate governance disclosure in 86 annual reports of companies listed on the Stock Exchange of Mauritius for the financial periods 2018–2019 and 2019–2020, one-way analysis of variance tests and draws on the typology of corporate governance explanations developed by Shrives and Brennan (2015), focusing on specificity, location and comprehensiveness dimensions. This paper draws on legitimacy theory and the concepts of substantive and symbolic disclosures to guide the interpretation of the findings.

From a specificity point of view, the disclosure index revealed significant variations, with the highest score being four times the lowest score. With regards to location and comprehensiveness, only around half of companies are making optimum use of a corporate governance report and providing explanations by principles. This paper also illustrated how some firms provided symbolic disclosures. Overall, there are disparities in the application of the code by companies, reflected in a blend of substantive and symbolic disclosures to maintain their legitimacy.

This study examines “apply and explain” disclosures in a emerging economy in contrast to the “comply or explain” approach studied so far in the literature. Merely professing a “well intended” shift to the “apply and explain” approach does not necessarily lead to improvements in the quality of corporate governance disclosures. Companies, governance professionals and regulatory bodies could formulate disclosure guidance to better underpin the implications of the “apply and explain” approach.

This paper aims to examine the effect of family control on corporate anticorruption disclosures of UK publicly listed firms and whether female board directors moderate the latter relationship.

This paper uses Poisson regression analysis for a sample of 1,546 FTSE 350 firm-year observations. Weighted least squares and propensity score matching are then used to assess the robustness of the findings.

The results show that family ownership and involvement are negatively associated with anticorruption disclosures. The tests of moderation indicate that female directors decrease the negative effect of family control on anticorruption disclosures.

To the best of the researcher’s knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate the impact of family control on anticorruption disclosures while taking into consideration the moderating effect of female directors.

This study aims to investigate the role of regional environmental transparency on corporate environmental disclosure.

This study uses the introduction of a nationwide automated air pollution monitoring network in China as a quasi-natural experiment and employs regression analysis. Robustness checks, including parallel trend test and placebo test, are performed to test the robustness of the results.

Sharing air pollution data with the public can improve corporate environmental disclosure. Firms with poorer environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance prefer to disclose less informative information after the automated network is implemented compared with firms with better ESG performance. The relationship between information sharing and corporate environmental transparency is more pronounced when local air pollution is severer, firms face stronger investor scrutiny and firms are from heavily polluting industries. The mechanism tests suggest the automated system can draw public environmental attention and improve governments’ aspiration for environmental governance. Finally, corporate environmental disclosure can reduce stock price crash risk and cost of equity.

Real-time pollution data reporting is an important solution to raising public environmental awareness and then enhancing the effectiveness of pollution control.

This study has implications for policy-making regarding environmental governance and environmental disclosure.

This study confirms that pollution information transparency can motivate firms to increase environmental disclosure.

This work aims to analyze and observe the trends in the literature on corporate governance and disclosure. The study presents bibliometric analyses from the Scopus database for the period 1991–2020.

A bibliometric analysis is conducted on 1,697 studies on corporate governance and disclosure across several countries. The articles were assessed and visualized with Vosviewer based on the authors, sources and countries with the highest publication rate, journals with the most published research and highly cited articles and authors.

The analyses provide a comprehensive outlook of the field, and the results show the dominance of documents on corporate governance and disclosure in 2020. The results have been discussed with avenues for further research.

This paper focuses on corporate governance and disclosure research from the Scopus database to highlight the extensive and somewhat ignored areas in extant literature. This would aid upcoming researchers in identifying scholars in the field when exploring future research avenues to close ensuing gaps.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of corporate governance on voluntary disclosure of different types of information in annual reports of Malaysian listed firms.

A linear regression model is used to test the association between the level of voluntary disclosure of five key information categories and corporate governance. The sample consists of 100 firms over three different socio‐economic periods: 1996, 2001 and 2006.

There are significant increases in all the key information categories with better communication most pronounced between 1996 and 2001, and a noticeably lower level of communication growth between 2001 and 2006. The strength of a firm's corporate governance structure clearly influences the voluntary disclosure of information relating to corporate and strategic directions, directors and senior management, financial and capital markets, forward‐looking projections and corporate social responsibility in 2001 and 2006.

The use of a governance index to arrive at an overall corporate governance score has the potential to mask major underlying relationships of individual governance attributes. The use of the self‐constructed disclosure indices may also omit certain information items that are employed in other prior studies. Moreover, the different categories of disclosures are solely constructed on the information disclosed in the annual reports without considering the alternative avenues.

The results will assist regulators and policy‐makers to better understand the impact of corporate governance on the voluntary disclosure of different types of corporate information in Malaysia.

This study generates evidence of the changing scene of management voluntary disclosure practices embedded in the corporate governance framework in a developing country with an emerging capital market.

Recent regulatory changes in Europe have promoted non-financial reporting practices (e.g., Directive, 2014/95/EU) and gender diversity in decision-making positions. Special attention is devoted to promoting the gender balance on corporate boards as a key mechanism to enhance corporate governance effectiveness and better address multiple stakeholders' needs. With this in mind, this study intends to examine the impact of boardroom gender diversity on Environmental Social Governance (ESG) disclosure practices in the European listed firms' context.

The study applies different panel data models on an extended sample of 1,392 firms from 21 European Union (EU) countries for six years (2014–2019).

Findings allow to spotlight the positive role exerted by the presence of women directors on the boards in enhancing ESG disclosure, both at the overall and specific (individual ESG scores) level.

Policymakers and regulators might consider the study's evidence as a stimulus to continue in promoting strategic actions and reforms that foster gender equality and balance in corporate decision-making positions.

Creating a heterogeneous and diversified board of directors may support implementing a “sustainable corporate governance” recently claimed by the EC.

The study contributes to the literature by disentangling the links between gender diversity and ESG disclosure over a period that covers a long season of European regulations and measures that affected both non-financial reporting practices and the board of directors' composition. Accordingly, it can contribute to enhancing the practical and theoretical understanding of the pivotal role that gender diversity may exert in strengthening corporate governance and, in turn, corporate transparency and accountability behaviours about non-financial issues.