دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی ارتباط تعداد و کیفیت افشاء پایداری با کیفیت درآمد و درآمد دیجیتالی - اشپرینگر 2017

Abstract

Voluntary disclosures of sustainability information have recently received considerable attention by investors, regulators, and public companies in improving reliability and integrity of corporate reporting. We examine the association between the quantity and quality of sustainability disclosures and earnings quality in the context of corporate ethical value and culture. We posit that sustainability disclosures of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance reports are linked to earnings quality, because of the importance of both earnings quality and ESG sustainability disclosures to investors and trustworthiness of corporate reporting. We collect our sample of 35,110 firm-year observations between 1999 and 2015. Using both difference-in-difference tests and OLS regression, we find that sustainability disclosure quantity is positively associated with innate earnings quality and negatively correlated with discretionary earnings quality in mitigating managerial earnings manipulation and unethical opportunistic reporting behavior. Further tests illustrate that sustainability disclosure quality can strengthen the positive relation between innate earnings quality and sustainability disclosure quantity and mitigate the negative relation between discretionary earnings quality and sustainability disclosure quantity. Finally, additional tests suggest that the relation between earnings quality and sustainability disclosure quantity is moderated by corporate structure and prior-year sustainability performance. Our results provide policy, practical, and research implications as ESG sustainability reporting is being integrated into corporate culture and business models.

Conclusions

We investigate the relationship between voluntary sustainability disclosure and earnings quality by examining whether sustainability disclosure quantity/quality is a substitute or a complement to earnings quality. Following Moon Jr. (2014), we classify earnings quality into innate earnings quality and discretionary earnings quality and, respectively, investigate their relationships to sustainability disclosure. We construct two measures of sustainability disclosures in our main tests, sustainability disclosure quantity as a proxy for whether the firm issues sustainability reports and sustainability disclosure quality of whether and how the firm using the GRI guidelines in the preparation and assurance of sustainability reports. Specifically, we constructed sustainability disclosure quality as the application level of the GRI guideline in preparing sustainability disclosure, an advanced version of the GRI guideline (such as G4) and level and type of assurance on sustainability reports.

We perform both DID tests and OLS regression and find that sustainability disclosure quantity is positively correlated with innate earnings quality and negatively correlated with discretionary earnings quality. Moreover, DID tests suggest that sustainability disclosure quality can significantly influence the relation between earnings quality and sustainability disclosure quantity. We find that the positive correlation between sustainability disclosure quantity and innate earnings quality is more pronounced when sustainability disclosure quality is high, and the negative correlation between sustainability disclosure quantity and discretionary earnings quality is less pronounced when sustainability disclosure quality is high. Finally, further tests suggest that the relation between earnings quality and sustainability disclosure is moderated by certain factors. Specifically, the positive relation between innate earnings quality and sustainability disclosure quantity tends to mitigate if firms did well in prior-year sustainability performance. Results suggest that the negative relation between discretionary earnings quality and sustainability disclosure quantity tends to mitigate if the institutional ownership is high.