Corporate social responsibility disclosure and cash holdings

By | 2024-11-21T12:08:16+01:00 November 21st, 2024|

Giovanni Coppola, Michele Fabrizi, Marco Ghitti / Financial Reporting / 1-2024

Purpose: the demand for firms to disclose their corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities has risen steeply over the last two decades, pushing many jurisdic-tions to implement mandatory non-financial reporting. We exploit the European non-financial reporting directive (NFRD) to study how companies change their cash management policies in response to additional mandatory CSR disclosure requirements. Methodology: we adopted a difference-in-differences (DID) approach, which is designed to estimate causality between the mandatory adoption of the NFRD and firms’ cash holdings. We implemented a two-way fixed effect model in the context of mandatory disclosure and staggered adoption of regulation, in order to study how firms changed their cash holdings following the introduction of the NFRD. Findings: we find that firms increased cash holdings following enactment of the NFRD, which is in line with the theory that cash is held for precautionary reasons. The growth in cash holdings is not equally distributed, as it is less pronounced in firms that are in a high-investment phase. Our findings reveal that mandatory non-financial disclosure can have real effects. Originality/value: This research shows that, in the short-term, mandatory CSR disclosure can have real effects on cash holding. Long-term effects should be con-sidered further by future research. Practical implications (optional): Policymakers should consider that additional CSR requirements are costly to firms, and thus find mechanisms that induce firms to adopt these requirements despite their costs.

 

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CSR disclosure in banking: A qualitative literature review

By | 2023-09-28T09:56:51+02:00 September 25th, 2023|

Pablo de Andrés, Salvatore Polizzi, Enzo Scannella, Nuria Suárez/ Financial Reporting / 1-2023

Purpose: This paper reviews the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure in banking to identify the most relevant aspects analyzed to date and avenues for future research. The CSR concept is key in the banking industry and banks are pushed to improve their social and environmental performance, and to disclose information about CSR in their financial and non-financial reports. Design/methodology/approach: This paper adopts a mixed literature review approach, based on a qualitative analysis of the literature and complemented by some structured systematic analyses. The theoretical frameworks employed in the literature, the time and geographical distribution of the samples analyzed, and the main findings of the studies indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and EBSCOhost are also examined. Findings: The findings show that (i) there is a significant gap between the liter-ature focusing on the financial dimension of bank disclosure and that exploring the CSR dimension; (ii) the time horizons analyzed in the empirical literature are concentrated around the 2008-2009 global financial crisis; (iii) the empirical litera-ture mainly focuses on the most developed European, North American and Asian countries. Originality/value: This study contributes to extant literature by describing the state of the art on CSR disclosure in banking and paving the way for future re-search on this topic. A call for research is raised on corruption-related disclosure and the relationship between national economic development and bank transpar-ency, with specific reference to CSR disclosure.

 

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Put Your Money where Your Mouth is: The Difference between Real Commitment to Sustainability and Mere Rhetoric

By | 2017-12-22T10:26:32+01:00 December 21st, 2017|

Bini Laura, Bellucci Marco, Giunta Francesco/ Financial Reporting, Riviste / Fascicolo: 2-2016

Companies exhibit growing interest in sustainability rhetoric. Such an interest is alternatively justified by a company’s need to address legitimacy instances, rather than to satisfy stakeholders’ requests about its sustainability performance. Whatever the case, a main debated issue concerning sustainability rhetoric deals with the difficulties in understanding whether companies’ commitment towards sustainability is “real”, or it only consists of “empty words” that hide opportunistic strategies. Our paper contributes to this debate, proposing a methodological approach, which is based on a company’s business model (BM) representation. We argue that the inclusion of adequate sustainability information in a company’s BM representation can testify to a real company’s engagement, as it illustrates how sustainability affects its value creation process. Compared to extant methodological proposals, mainly based on linguistic analyses, our approach does not require specific competences to be applied. Moreover, it saves user’s time, as it allows the assessment of entire company’s sustainability rhetoric through the analysis of the information reported in its BM. Our approach is consistent with previous contributions that propose a company’s BM as a representation device able to illustrate strategic information that cannot be represented in the traditional corporate reporting. Our approach proposes a possible answer to address the challenges faced by regulators and standard setters involved in the regulation of sustainability disclosure. Such approach has found a first step of implementation in the UK, where since 2013, listed companies are requested to describe their BM in Strategic Reports.

Keywords: Sustainability rhetoric, business model, corporate social responsibility, non-financial disclosure, mining industry

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