Mohammed S. Y. Omran

1. In recent corporate reporting history, the differential impact of mandatory versus voluntary reporting regimes has consistently been regarded as a critical factor shaping regulatory oversight of...

Integrated reporting is a fairly recent phenomenon in the corporate reporting realm. Its dawn marks a new age of corporate reporting where financial and non‐financial information and their interrelation create an integrated and holistic approach for telling a value creation story. In tandem with this transformation, business sustainability in general and environmental performance, in particular, are also gaining prominence in the corporate landscape. This scholarly article investigates the relationship between integrated reporting and corporate environmental performance. A panel‐data is used to carry out the study using a sample of 110 firms listed on the Johannesburg Stock exchange for the years 2014–2018, where Integrated Reporting was first mandated. The empirical results are robust and consistent with our predictions in that integrated reporting is found positively associated with corporate environmental performance. Our findings pave the way for a new stream of literature on the transformation and the connectivity functions of integrated reporting.

Is there a value-relevance associated with the disclosure of a corporate mission? In this study the mission orientation of 143 UK listed companies are analysed according to their orientation towards shareholders, stakeholders, customers and markets. Performance is then analysed by means of multiple regressions, allowing for beta, gearing, size and tax, as control variables, and taking account of mission orientation by means of a dummy variable in separate regressions. As to the accounting return on equity, dummy variables were not significant in the service sector. In the non-service sector the shareholder-orientated dummy was relevant to the accounting return on equity over three years, but the overall model was not very significant. However, three-year stock returns in the service sector are strongly influenced by whether company mission is shareholder orientated or not. In the non-service sector, six-year stock returns, and also excess returns, are influenced by whether a company is stakeholder orientated or not. Mission, according to customer orientation, did not affect performance. The overall conclusion is that there may be some value-relevance attached to mission orientation, although in this sample it was invariant to customer-orientation.