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This paper aims to determine the association between corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting of listed banks and female representation on boards while controlling for the impact of gender quotas.

Logistic regressions are used with bank fixed effects on a global sample of 285 commercial banks from 2005 to 2017.

There exists a positive association between the proportion of women on board and banks’ CSR disclosure. Positive association remains also after quota corrections for banks with either below- or above-quota female representation. Further, adding more women to boards than required by quota could affect boards’ CSR reporting in masculine countries but not in feminine countries.

The results are not generalizable to smaller listed banks and the used estimation approach does not enable to detect causality.

Policymakers interested in improving banks’ CSR reporting could introduce gender quotas.

Gender quotas can enforce banks’ sustainable behaviour.

First, it is the first study to thoroughly control for gender quotas while investigating the association between female representation on boards and CSR disclosure. Second, this paper moves forward from the so-far predominant concentration on single-country studies on banks’ CSR reporting. Third, this paper covers the aspect of a country’s masculinity-femininity as a factor that could influence the association between CSR disclosure and female representation.

This study explores the causes of delayed mandatory annual report filings of private companies in Estonia.

The authors use an online survey targeting companies that had submitted annual reports for 2017 late (late-filers) or failed to submit these by July 2020 (non-filers). The responses of 492 late-filers and 122 non-filers are analysed with exploratory factor analysis, Mann–Whitney U-Test and logistic regression.

Annual report filing decisions of both, late-filers and non-filers, are strongly driven by administrative costs attached to the preparation and submission of reports with non-filers perceiving these to be significantly greater. The relevance of other disclosure-related costs and benefits remains similar for both late-filers and non-filers. While proprietary and privacy concerns remain rather unimportant, benefits of timely disclosure, in the form of access to financing and possibilities to continue ordinary business activities, remain important disclosure timing drivers.

Policy interventions should focus on preventive measures that hinder companies' ordinary business activities in case of non-compliance to reporting deadlines. Monetary sanctions can be used to strengthen the desired behaviour alongside broader clarification of the purpose of mandatory reporting and available exemptions.

The authors propose an empirically testable comprehensive one-period model of disclosure timing decisions of private companies differentiating late-filers and non-filers. The authors address the limitations of previous studies through a survey that allows the authors to draw direct inferences about the trade-offs between different decision drivers and the motivations behind managers' disclosure timing decisions.

Corporate finance, financial management.

The case is suitable for Master's level corporate finance or financial management courses. Sufficient prior theoretical knowledge of corporate finance concepts is required.

Väätsa Agro AS is an Estonian dairy farming company. Although the company had operated successfully in the past, its ownership changed significantly in 2006 leading to changes in the company's capital structure. Starting from 2008 milk prices on global markets decreased and this trend had also affected the company's profits. As a result of these developments the company's financial situation had deteriorated since 2008 and towards the end of 2009 the company had problems in meeting its obligations. On 1 September 2009 its owners hired a consultancy firm represented by Karl Kukk to tackle the company's problems.

The case should help students to: understand the risks of LBOs; understand the importance of an appropriate capital structure of a firm; evaluate a company's financial situation and compare it with competitors; understand the alternatives facing firms in financial distress; and choose the best course of action for a distressed firm considering the pros and cons of each alternative for each stakeholder group.

Teaching notes are available; please consult your librarian for access.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure level of 35 international banks across the world at the end of 2013 and analyse the changes in their disclosure patterns compared to 2005 from the institutional perspective.

Content analysis of international banks’ web-sites and CSR reports.

As expected, CSR disclosure scores of international banks in 2013 were significantly larger than in 2005. Despite addressing the legitimacy gap after the 2008 crisis, significant room for improvements remained in the context of sustainable products, implementation of environmental management policies and introduction of CSR initiatives (the latter especially for Northern American banks). Although the transnational context had contributed to the gradual convergence of CSR disclosure scores, the existence of differing national and organisational contexts had maintained some of the diversity across banks.

Content analysis approach used limits the possibilities to objectively grasp the depth of CSR and the sample remains biased towards larger international banks headquartered in Europe.

Stakeholders should remain vary of “window-dressing” attempts and reward only those banks that actually contribute to the society.

Intergovernmental organisations should continue to develop both new and already existing financial sector CSR initiatives to improve the stability of the global financial sector.

Previous studies have not investigated international banks’ CSR disclosures on broader global samples during the post-2008-crisis period and have not considered the institutional context of their CSR.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the 2008 financial crisis is reflected in the CSR disclosure quantity and readability of banks' headquarters and subsidiaries, and how banks' disclosure patterns differ across these units.

Embedded multiple case study utilising quantitative content analysis and readability indices.

As expected, Nordic banks' headquarters' disclosure quantity and readability outperforms those of their Baltic subsidiaries/branches. However, no convergence of intra-group CSR disclosure practices is detected. Banks' response to the legitimacy gap seems to depend on CSR reporting strategy: passive superficial (Baltic subsidiaries/branches, ABLV), passive thorough (Swedbank), intermediate (Danske Bank) and active (SEB). Passive and intermediate strategy pursuers' CSR disclosure quantity and readability remains stable during the financial crisis period. However, active strategy pursuers increase disclosure quantity and reduce readability indicating possible stakeholder manipulation attempts. Both intermediate and active strategy pursuers disclose in greater detail steps taken to improve CSR behaviour.

Results may not be transferable to the pre-2007 period, to other contexts and to Western European subsidiaries.

Introduction of plain English into CSR communication could enable to decrease stakeholder manipulation attempts made through CSR texts.

Previous studies have not investigated CSR disclosures of banks operating in the Baltic countries and globally have not focused on their readability, headquarter-subsidiary differences and 2008 financial crisis contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to determine to what extent economically significant stock return and volume changes on Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius Stock Exchanges (TSE, RSE, VSE) are contributable to public announcements disclosures and which types of announcements drive these.

Event‐study methodology was used to determine economically significant return and volume events.

It was found that 22‐37 per cent of return or volume events explained by public announcements was twice lower than reported in the UK. The greatest frequency of disclosures was attributable to financial disclosures as could be expected. Although, previous research indicates bigger magnitude of reaction to financial news, it was not observed in case of public announcements. Whereas, the magnitude of reactions on VSE was greater than reported on TSE and RSE, which indicates that VSE differs from TSE and RSE in its information processing.

Firstly, all other mediums of disclosure besides public announcements are excluded. Secondly, the focus on public announcements discards all other factors that could induce market reactions. Thirdly, investors are assumed to act rationally.

The relative importance of different news items in inducing market reactions on the three Baltic stock exchanges has not been previously investigated. Only one previous study has covered a developed capital market of the UK, which means that this paper enables to compare its results to the ones achieved in a developing capital market setting.

The authors examine the performance of individual global equity funds in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and separate the skill of their fund managers from luck.

The authors use cross-sectional bootstrap simulations to study the monthly net and gross returns of 175 funds over the period September 2005 to December 2019. Simulations are applied to three, four, and five-factor asset pricing models, and to regressions run on fund-specific benchmark indexes. The authors also examine the value added by all funds and by fund size groups.

Using multifactor models, a majority of the individual funds fail to deliver alpha, both net and gross of fees; whereas, most of the negative alphas appear due to poor skills, not bad luck. Relative to benchmark indexes, about 5% of the sample shows skill only gross of fees, indicating that fund management fees absorb this skill. As a whole, global equity funds in CEE add more economic value than they destroy, gross of fees, which is largely driven by large funds.

Market-tracking passive indexes are the most reliable choice for investors who want to maximise their risk-adjusted returns at the lowest possible cost. However, investors with a high level of risk appetite might prefer small actively managed funds in CEE when market conditions are stable or growing. Investors who are less risk tolerant might prefer large actively managed funds.

This is the first study to shed light on the presence of skill in mutual fund returns in CEE.