Recently there has been increased interest in sustainable development and sustainability reporting. This study conducts content analysis to examine, ex post, whether the sample companies' voluntary sustainability reporting within their annual reports represents attempts to gain, maintain or...

Materiality is the driver through which companies can select issues to be included in non-financial reports favouring expectations of all the stakeholders. The aim of this research is to investigate, under the lens of Stakeholder Theory and Instrumental Stakeholder Theory, the possible...

Globally, companies increasingly publish separate general purpose, non-financial (sustainability) reports. Some of these are independently assured and assurers may or may not be from the auditing profession. We seek to understand this emerging voluntary assurance market. Using a sample of 2,113...

One of the major challenges faced in the area of accounting for sustainability is the complexity and uncertainty of the subject matter, beginning with the lack of a clearly understood definition of sustainable development (SD) (Herath & Gamini, 2005). In most of the literature, SD is defined as...

Sustainability reporting awareness is increasing worldwide. Extant research examining sustainability reporting has mainly focused on developed economies. With the exception of South Africa, there has not been much progress made in sustainability reporting by firms in African countries. This...

Ensuring compliance of sustainability reports, especially Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting, with the EU Taxonomy is essential in the European Union. In parallel, a significant transformation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be observed, shifting from task-specific models...

In this essay, we discuss the factors influencing the likelihood of convergence in corporate sustainability reporting. We identify several factors that negatively influence the probability of convergence in the short term. The first factor is the heterogeneity of concepts and definitions...

We examine the impact of COVID-19 on changes in firm value, and the moderating role of firm-level sustainability performance on this relationship. We find that firms domiciled in countries where the COVID-19 impact is more devastating experience greater decline in firm value. The negative impact...