Judicial Branch. We thank John Jiang for generously providing us the SAS code for computing executive incentives. We thank the Abstract We examine the influence of general counsel on firms' accounting quality and earnings management practices. We consider two views of the role of general counsel and how they relate to financial reporting. The first is the " gatekeeper " role in which the genera...

Building on an institutionalist framework of the various organizational field-level pressures on firms to engage with the challenge of corruption, we analyse anti-corruption disclosures across a sample of 933 sustainability reports. Such reporting complements anti-corruption initiatives, as it allows the company to demonstrate its commitment. Our results show clear countryand sector-level diffe...

This paper is the first large scale, quantitative study of the impact of corporate carbon management practices on corporate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Using data for 2009 and 2010 from the Carbon Disclosure Project survey, we find little compelling evidence that commonly adopted management practices are reducing emissions. This finding is unexpected and we propose three possible explanatio...

Sustainability is one of the biggest challenges in our industrialized societies. It has become an important strategic objective for all companies over the world, trying to keep a dynamic balance of the organizations’ economic, environmental and social performance. Transparency about the organizations’ activities is of great interest for a range of stakeholders. For that reason organizations sho...

Corpo3:ate Social Reporting from a Theoretical • Concept to Regular Business Information ? Some thoughts on recent developments in Germany The paper reviews European developments in corporate social reporting, with special emphasis on the West German experience. Approaches to social reporting being used by German businesses are described, and results of an extensive survey on socially relevant ...

We examine the effect of mandatory sustainability reporting on several measures of socially responsible management practices. Using data for 58 countries, we show that after the adoption of mandatory sustainability reporting laws and regulations, the social responsibility of business leaders increases. We also document that both sustainable development and employee training become a higher prio...