0000000000603122
AUTHOR
Laura Sierra
Sustainability Development and the Quality of Assurance Reports: Empirical Evidence
There is a rising trend among companies to publish their sustainability or corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. Assurance of these reports is a valuable voluntary tool to provide them with higher credibility. Nonetheless, the quality of assurance reports differs in practice and the objective of this paper is to provide evidence in this new area of research. Indeed, we are pioneers in developing an index to measure the quality of assurance reports. We choose the Spanish setting because it is the worldwide leading country as regards CSR reporting (KPMG, 2011; Sierra et al., 2012). We have found evidence on the determinants for CSR reporting posited by existing literature that have a…
Sustainable Development and Assurance of Corporate Social Responsibility Reports Published by Ibex-35 Companies
Spain is the world's leading country as regards corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting (KPMG, 2011). In addition, Spain is taking new initiatives with regard to environmental policy, sustainable development, and stakeholder engagement in accordance with Law 2/2011.This is why we choose Spain as the setting to analyze whether the determinants for external assurance posited by existing literature (industry, size, profitability, leverage) have an impact on the decision of companies to assure their CSR reports. Our study is a pioneer in the sense that it investigates the possible links between the auditor of the annual report and the provider of assurance. The results of this study ind…