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This study aims to measure the relationship between corporate governance and non-financial reporting (NFR) in higher education institutions (HEIs). Board effectiveness, student engagement, audit quality, Vice-Chancellor (VC) pay and VC gender are targeted for analysis.

This study is based on content analysis. The authors used the EU NFR Directive (2014/95/EU) to measure NFR. This includes environmental, corporate social responsibility, human rights, corporate board effectiveness and corruption and bribery. Cross-sectional data was collected from 89 HEIs worldwide across 15 different countries over three years. Content analysis, the weighted scoring method and panel data analysis are used to obtain the results.

Through a neo-institutional theoretical lens, this study provides a broader understanding of NFR content disclosure practices within HEIs. The findings reveal that the audit quality, VC pay and VC gender are significantly and positively associated with NFR content disclosure. However, board effectiveness has a significant negative impact on NFR content disclosure. More interestingly, the findings reveal that student engagement has an insignificant association with NFR content disclosure and there significant difference on the level of NFR content disclosure across universities situated in the different geographical region such as the USA, Australia, the UK and EU, Asia and Canada. The findings have important implications for regulators and policymakers. The evidence appears to be robust when controlling for possible endogeneities.

The study contributes to the literature on corporate non-financial disclosure as it provides new insights of corporate governance mechanisms and NFR disclosure within HEIs.

This paper aims to examine the level of disclosure on content elements of integrated reporting (IR) in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales higher education institutions (HEIs). The authors suggest that integrated thinking is an internal process that organizations can follow to increase the level of disclosure on IR that can be used as an effective mechanism to enhance accountability with stakeholders.

International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) guidelines and content analysis are used to analyze IR content elements in HEI reports from 2014-2016.

The results indicate a significant increase in the trend and extent of IR content elements. The HEI-specific characteristics examined, such as establishment of HEI; adoption of IR framework and governing board size are all statistically and positively associated with IR content elements disclosure. This paper introduces signalling theory to explore the idea that appropriate communication via integrated thinking can close the gap between the organization and its stakeholders via increased level of disclosure on IR content elements.

The results will assist policymakers and regulators to assess the benefits of voluntary implementation of IR at HEIs and evaluate possible mandatory implementation of IIRC guidelines. Second, the findings can assist managers of institutions interested in implementing IR.

This study recommends universities to explicitly address IR issues in reporting, as this will increase their impact as leaders of educational thought in addition to their roles as partners, advisors, counselors and assessors.

This study explores whether HEIs in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales provide disclosure on IIRC content elements as a reflection of integrated thinking and whether the connectivity and interdependence between different departments will help to signal to stakeholders how HEIs create value for society.

This paper aims to investigate the supply and demand side of sustainability assurance in Bangladesh.

Drawing on signalling theory, a logistic regression model is used for a sample of 100 of the largest Bangladeshi companies to study the relationships between assurance, sustainability disclosure, industry membership and reporting format.

Authors’ results show that companies which produce more sustainability information are more likely to get their sustainability assured, to be from non-carbon intensive industries, and are more likely to integrate their sustainability information with the financial annual reports. Authors’ results support the argument that organisations based in weaker legal environments are more likely to secure assurance as this adds to the credibility and reliability of sustainability reports.

This paper has limitations which raise some issues for future research. First, the authors have covered only large companies; therefore, future research could examine the differences between small and large companies in relation to assurance. Secondly, the authors’ data consist of company sustainability disclosure information in the fiscal year 2015. Longitudinal studies are recommended to extend this research. Finally, future research could examine the moderating effects of geographical location on the relationship between assurance (and its providers) and other variables.

The findings of this paper will prove valuable to practitioners and researchers. Practitioners, including assurance providers and sustainability reporting managers will benefit from authors’ study as it covers both the demand and supply side characteristics of assurance. Researchers will benefit from the study as it investigates assurance practices in the developing country of Bangladesh.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine both the supply and demand sides of sustainability assurance in Bangladesh. Authors also introduce reporting format when measuring the relationship between assurance and its determinant factors at micro level. The study also links assurance to signalling theory.

The purpose of this paper is to assess whether European companies issue standalone environmental reports in an attempt to gain and maintain legitimacy with relevant stakeholders. This is achieved by creating and empirically testing a model of the relationships between corporate reporting format, industry membership, environmental disclosure, and environmental performance.

Data are collected from 100 large European companies in carbon and non-carbon-intensive industries. Hypothesis testing is conducted via structure equation modeling.

Evidence exists that companies which disclose environmental information in standalone environmental reports tend to provide higher levels of environmental information than companies which combine financial and environmental disclosure in annual reports. The findings support greenwashing as a new perspective of legitimacy theory: companies in carbon-intensive industry use standalone environmental reports to pose as good corporate citizens even when they are not.

The sample companies are large European companies and this could limit the generalizability of research findings. The authors call for longitudinal studies examining how the relationship between reporting format and environmental disclosure changes.

This paper suggests that reporting format be considered a proactive, strategic communication-driven activity rather than a decision that managers passively make in response to external scrutiny.

The paper contributes to the literature by adding to the scarce evidence of the relationship between reporting format and environmental disclosure. Greenwashing as a new perspective of legitimacy theory is used to develop research hypotheses.

The purpose of this paper is to examine prominent issues and contributions from extant research and explore the literature on the services provided by Knowledge-Intensive Public Organizations (KIPOs) and its pursuit to achieve the United Nations (UN) 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (hereafter referred to as the UN 2030 SDGs agenda) amidst the challenges represented by COVID-19 pandemic. It emphasizes the crucial role of accounting in dealing with techniques and social and moral practices concerned with the sustainable utilization of resources. This paper also provides an overview of the other papers presented in this JPBAFM Special Issue and draws from their findings to scope out future impactful research opportunities in this area.

The design consists of a review and examination of the prior relevant literature and the other papers published in this JPBAFM Special Issue.

The paper identifies and summarizes three key research themes in the extant literature: the growth in the types of KIPO; the rise in the research approaches to study the provision of public services by KIPO in pursuit of the UN 2030 SDG agenda and the consequent call for developments in the accounting field; and unintended consequences during COVID-19 pandemic. It draws upon work within these research themes to set out four broad areas for future impactful research.

The value of this paper rests with collating and synthesizing several important research themes on the nature and unintended consequences of the UN 2030 SDG agenda, and the challenges represented by COVID-19 pandemic in the governance, management and accounting for KIPO and in prompting future extensions of this work through setting out areas for further innovative research within the field.

The research examined in this paper and the future research avenues proposed are highly relevant to the health sector, the judiciary, museums, research centers and the UN. The focus on accounting and accountability towards a broader spectrum of stakeholders calls for new avenues of study in the accounting field. They also offer important insights into matters of management, accounting, accountability, sustainability accounting and control more generally.

The research examined in this paper and the future research avenues proposed are highly relevant to the health sector, the judiciary, museums, universities, research centers and the UN. They also offer important insights into matters of management, accounting, accountability, sustainability accounting and control more generally.

This paper adds to vibrant existing streams of research in the area of KIPO by bringing together authors from different areas of accounting research for this JPBAFM Special Issue. In scoping out an agenda for impactful research approaches used to study the provision of public services by KIPO, this paper also draws attention to underexplored issues pertaining to extents such as the “lived experience” of personnel in the KIPO and envisioning what a future system of governance, management and accounting of SDG might look like.

This paper aims to contribute to the existing capital structure and board structure literature by examining the relationship among corporate governance, ownership structure and capital structure.

The paper uses a panel data of 595 firm-year observations from a unique and comprehensive data set of 119 Chinese real estate listed firms from 2014 to 2018. It uses fixed effect and random effect regression analysis techniques to examine the hypotheses.

The results show that the board size, ownership concentration and firm size have positive influences on capital structure. State ownership and firm profitability have inverse influences on capital structure.

The findings suggest that better-governed companies in the real estate sector tend to have better capital structure. These findings highlight the unique Chinese context and also offer regulators a strong incentive to pursue corporate governance reforms formally and jointly with the ownership structure. Finally, the results suggest investors the chance to shape detailed expectations about capital structure behavior in China. Future research could investigate capital structure using different arrangement, conducting face-to-face meetings with the firm’s directors and shareholders.

The findings offer support to corporate managers and investors in forming or/and expecting an optimal capital structure and to policymakers and regulators for ratifying laws and developing institutional support to improve the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms.

This paper extends, as well as contributes to the current capital structure and corporate governance literature, by proposing new evidence on the effect of board structure and ownership structure on capital structure. The results will help policymakers in different countries in estimating the sufficiency of the available corporate governance reforms to improve capital structure management.

This paper aims to examine trends in the content of reporting within 135 UK higher education institutions (HEIs). It explores the extent to which integrated reporting (IR) content elements, reflecting integrated thinking, are disclosed voluntarily and whether HEI-specific features influence the resulting disclosures.

Existing IR guidelines given by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) and the adoption of content analysis have provided the opportunity to examine the trend and extent of IR content elements associated in HEI corporate reports. The evidence was obtained from 405 UK HEI annual reports covering the period 2014-2016.

The results indicate a significant increase in the number of IR content elements embedded in HEI annual reports. The HEI-specific characteristics examined, such as the establishment of HEI (before or after 1992), adoption of IR framework and size of HEI, are all significantly and positively associated with IR content elements disclosure. This paper argues that institutional theory, isomorphism and isopraxism are relevant for explaining the changes in the contents of HEI annual reports. The findings also suggest that universities are beginning to adopt an integrated thinking approach to the reporting of their activities.

The study is based on IR content elements only and could be extended to include the fundamental concepts and basic principles of the IR framework. There are other factors that have a potentially crucial influence on HEI core activities (such as teaching and learning research and internationalisation) which have been omitted from this study.

The findings will allow policymakers to evaluate the extent to which integrated thinking is taking place and influencing the UK HEI sector in the selection and presentation of information. A further implication of the findings is that an appropriate a sector-wide enforcement and compliance body, for instance, the British Universities Finance Directors Group (BUFDG), may consider developing voluntary IR guidance in a clear, consistent, concise and comparable format. Also, it may pursue regulatory support for this guidance. In doing so, it may monitor the compliance and disclosure levels of appropriate IR requirements. Within such a framework, IR could be used to assist HEIs to make more sustainable choices and allow stakeholders to better understand aspects of HEI performance.

The research has implications for society within and beyond the unique UK HEI sector. Universities are places of advanced thinking and can lead the way for other sectors by demonstrating the potential of integrated thinking to create a cohesive wide-ranging discourse and create engagement among stakeholder groups. Specifically, IR builds on the strong points of accounting, for instance, robust quantitative evidence collecting, relevance, reliability, materiality, comparability and assurability, to explain the sustainability discourse into a “language” logical to HEIs organisational decision makers. Consequently, IR may generate better visibility and knowledge of the financial values of exploiting capitals (financial, intellectual, human, manufactured, social and natural) and offer a multifaceted approach to reassess HEIs organizational performance in various sectors that support the growth of integrated thinking.

This is the first known study to explore HEI characteristics and link them with the level of voluntary IR content elements disclosed in UK HEIs.

Female entrepreneurs have made increasing contributions to entrepreneurial activity and economic development worldwide, especially in emerging economies. It is well acknowledged that Bangladesh is one such South Asian emerging economy with many institutional and sociocultural challenges. This study aims to examine the effect of the institutional environment (formal and informal institutional factors) that influences female entrepreneurs in an emerging country, namely, Bangladesh.

The authors used a quantitative research method using a questionnaire. The authors established the conceptual framework reflecting a model so that they could test their assumptions among female entrepreneurs from an institutional perspective. The conceptual framework was empirically tested and validated. Consequently, this study comprised 324 usable survey responses. To analyse the quantitative data, partial least squares-structural equation modelling was used.

The findings highlight that social networks, access to finance and non-economic support have negative and insignificant effects on informal female entrepreneurs. Conversely, entrepreneurial attitudes, cultural context, institutional policy, family roles and education were positive and significant and found to be more important for female entrepreneurship in Bangladesh.

The results of this study offer empirical evidence of institutional factors as well as focus on three dimensions, women’s experiences from an institutional perspective, Asian culture and the operation of female entrepreneurial activity in an emerging economy (contextual perspective).

This paper aims to contribute to the discussion on the executives’ team and firm performance by investigating the relationships between executives’ compensation, management gender diversity and firm financial performance in growth enterprises market (GEM) listed firms in China.

Data are collected from 461 companies listed on GEM boards during the period from the year 2016 to 2018. Specifically, executives’ compensation and female executives are set as the independent variables, and the proxy selected of corporate performance is Tobin’s Q ratio.

The results show that the correlation between corporate performance and executive cash payment is not significant, while executives’ equity-based compensation shows a significant positive correlation with firm performance. In addition, the participation of female executives is negatively associated with firm performance.

The results have practical implications for governments, policymakers and regulatory authorities, by indicating the importance of women to corporate success. In particular, the findings of this paper emphasize the specific background of GEM in China and provide empirical support for the value of women’s participation in corporate governance. In addition, the finding on the relationship between executive compensation and corporate performance of GEM listed companies provides guidance for the establishment of a performance compensation system of GEM listed companies in China.

This paper provides new evidence for the current literature of executive team and corporate performance. This is the first paper to adopt triangulation in theories from different disciplines including optimal contractual approach, managerial power approach as new perspectives of agency theory, upper echelons theory, motivational-hygiene theory and women leadership style theory. The results will contribute to provide guidance for enterprises to formulate an efficient compensation system and build a reasonable senior management team structure.

This paper aims to provide a systematic review of the published literature on corporate social responsibility reporting (CSRR). Furthermore, it assesses the main limitations reported in previous CSRR studies and offers recommendations for best practice and future research.

A review protocol was developed to search nine major databases over a decade (2005–2017) using specific keywords. As a result, 221 articles were identified that deal explicitly with CSRR in both developed and developing countries, and a descriptive analysis was undertaken.

Findings of the review show that scholarly work on CSRR across the globe have increased exponentially. However, there still remain quite a few countries and industries that have been underrepresented in CSRR literature. Moreover, methodological- and sampling-related limitations have been noted by a number of scholars in the area. Based on these results, the review provides directions for future research.

The review provides a categorised bibliography of CSRR research on developed and developing countries from 2005 to 2017, covering a range of journals and countries. The review provides state of the art of the CSRR research and highlights the major loopholes in the current literature. This is a valuable study for academics pursuing research on CSRR as it provides a comprehensive and critical discussion on academic research in the field.