The Impact of Corporate Governance on the Quality of Integrated Reporting: International Evidence

This paper aims to investigate the impact of corporate governance on the quality of integrated reporting. Corporate governance includes internal (board size, board independence, and board diversity) and external (audit quality and enforcement) governance factors. This paper develops an index to capture the quality of integrated reporting by employing the completeness of information required by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC). For an international sample, the paper manually collects 160 integrated reports along with internal and external governance factors and employs multivariate analyses to examine the association between these governance factors and the quality of integrated reporting. The empirical results suggest that firms with a larger board of directors, a larger proportion of female members on board, and located in countries with enforcement for integrated reporting requirements have a higher quality of integrated reporting. Our conclusions still hold after accounting for several conditions, including the industry-fixed and year-fixed effects. Together, these results suggest that both internal and external governance factors are important determinants for the quality of integrating reporting. These results have several theoretical and practical implications as they fulfill the absence of relevant studies on addressing the impact of internal and external corporate governance factors on the quality of integrated reporting.