El consejo de administración y las memorias de sostenibilidad

Abstract

Although the disclosure of sustainability report is not compulsory, the role of the board of directors could be quite important in the publishing relevant information for decision making. Nowadays, and as a result of growing interest in environmental and social aspects of business performance and their impact on the company's long-term survival, the board's monitoring function over the economic and financial information has been extended to include sustainability reporting.This paper analyses the role played by certain features of the board, such as its size, level of activity and independence, as well as the diversity of its members, in the production and disclosure of a corporate social responsibility report.Previous empirical evidence regarding these new responsibilities undertaken by the board is mainly limited to cross-sectional analyses within single countries for a relatively short time period, and so the conclusions to be derived are necessarily restricted. In contrast, the present study involves the analysis of a sample of 690listed companies from 10European countries for the years 2004 to 2009.The results obtained show that large companies with correspondingly large and diverse boards are the most active in publishing significant, comparable sustainable information. This is also true with respect to the frequency of board meetings.