We examine a potential benefit associated with the initiation of voluntary disclosure of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities: a reduction in firms' cost of equity capital. We find that firms with a high cost of equity capital in the previous year tend to initiate disclosure of CSR...

Prior studies show that corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting is informative to investors but lacks credibility. This study examines whether a commitment to audits of financial outcomes, proxied by audit fees, is associated with greater CSR reporting credibility. We find that audit...

Over the past two decades, there has been growing interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) among accounting scholars. As a testament to this growing interest, two review papers on CSR were published last year in accounting journals. Cohen and Simnett (2015) review the academic...

We investigate the relation between societal trust and managers' decisions to voluntarily issue earnings forecasts. We reason that managers are more (less) likely to issue earnings forecasts in high-trust (low-trust) countries because these voluntary disclosures are viewed by investors as a...