Farah Zamir, Greg Shailer and Abubakr Saeed
Corporate investment efficiency ultimately influences economic development but is largely at the discretion of managers. Information asymmetries are problematic in emerging…
Abstract
Purpose
Corporate investment efficiency ultimately influences economic development but is largely at the discretion of managers. Information asymmetries are problematic in emerging markets, but it is widely believed that corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosures can reduce information asymmetries. This paper examines whether CSR disclosures influence corporate capital investment efficiency in emerging Asian markets.
Design/methodology/approach
Investment inefficiency is measured as the residuals from an investment model that is constructed by combining variables from prior studies to obtain a more detailed specification. A CSR disclosure index (CSRDI) is constructed from manually collected CSR disclosures for the largest corporations in each of the nine Asian emerging markets, as categorised by the MSCI Emerging Market Index, during 2015–2017. Underinvestments and overinvestments are regressed against the CSRDI, using a two-stage model to address the potential self-selection of CSR report issuers.
Findings
The results indicate that CSR disclosures reduce underinvestment for large firms but do not constrain overinvestment. These results are consistent with the propositions that, by increasing transparency or reducing information asymmetry, CSR disclosures can improve firm access to external finance needed to invest in profitable projects but cannot constrain entrenched managers who are not reliant on external finance.
Originality/value
This study extends the literature by analysing the impact of CSR disclosures on both underinvestments and overinvestments and by examining the CSR-investment efficiency across the nine emerging Asian markets. This enhances generalisability compared to single market studies. More generally, this study enhances the understanding of the role of non-financial disclosures in the Asian emerging markets, where corporate investment efficiency is important for economic development but where severe information asymmetry and agency conflicts between insiders and external investors are prevalent. Both the investment community and policymakers should benefit from enhanced understanding of factors that influence investment efficiency in those markets.
Details
Keywords
Jacqueline Birt and Greg Shailer
Changes in Australian segment reporting standards over the last decade changed the required disaggregation of segment information. The purpose of this paper is to investigate…
Abstract
Purpose
Changes in Australian segment reporting standards over the last decade changed the required disaggregation of segment information. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether increased disaggregation has implications for users' confidence in decisions based on segment reports and perceptions of segment reporting usefulness.
Design/methodology/approach
Using an experiment based on the differences between the original AASB 1005 and the more detailed requirements of AASB 114, the authors test whether segment report users' confidence in forecasting and their perceptions of segment report usefulness differ between the different information sets provided under these standards.
Findings
It was found that the more disaggregated or finer reports based on AASB 114 provide significantly more confidence to users, compared to the coarser segment reports based on the original AASB 1005, but this is not associated with differences in segment report usefulness scores.
Research limitations/implications
The authors' experiment is based on AASB 1005 and AASB 114 and the results cannot be generalized to differences with other reporting standards. Examination of differences in recently released AASB 8 may reveal different implications for users' confidence and perceptions of usefulness. More generally, other tests of usefulness are needed to confirm whether opinions of usefulness that are not confirmed by decision‐making practices provide a reliable basis for determining usefulness.
Practical implications
By confirming that decision makers' confidence can be increased by the provision of finer information sets, the authors' results have practical implications for accounting standard setting.
Originality/value
By testing the impact of report differences on user decision confidence, the paper addresses a previously overlooked issue.