Corporate Reports Research Articles

CONVENIENCE STORES AS CARE INFRASTRUCTURE FOR OLDER ADULTS: The Crisis of Care in Tokyo, Japan

AbstractConvenience stores are essential facilities for older people living in cities, but there is a lack of discussion about the relation thereof to care for older people. An emerging phenomenon in Japan, one of the countries with the most rapidly aging population, is that convenience stores are also becoming a form of care infrastructure. In this article, I focus on this phenomenon in a time of care crisis by examining convenience stores in Tokyo, Japan, through the framework of care infrastructure. I combine descriptive statistics, government and corporate reports with interviews with 15 older adults in Tokyo to assess the potential and challenges of convenience stores as entities that contribute to their care. The findings of my study indicate that convenience stores may contribute to the care of older people because of their proximity, multifunctionality, sociality and sheltering nature, while challenges relate to affordability, equity and fairness. In the conclusion, I offer some suggestions regarding opportunities for and challenges to expanding care in aging cities by rethinking the potential of convenience stores as social and physical infrastructure.

The Influence of Sanctions on Corporate Reporting Behaviour: International Evidence

The Influence of Sanctions on Corporate Reporting Behaviour: International Evidence

CSKINet: A multimodal network model integrating conceptual semantic knowledge injection for relation extraction of Chinese corporate reports

Recognizing the associations among entities in corporate reports accurately is crucial for market regulation and policy development. Nevertheless, confronted with massive corporate information, the traditional manual screening approach is cumbersome, struggling to match the demand. Consequently, we propose a multimodal network model incorporating conceptual semantic knowledge injection, CSKINet, for accurately extracting relations from Chinese corporate reports. The essential highlights in the design of the CSKINet model are the following: (1) Integrate the conceptual descriptions of corporations from external resources to construct the semantic knowledge repository of corporate concepts, which provides a solid semantic foundation for the model. (2) Multimodal features are extracted from the documents by various means and corporate conceptual knowledge is integrated into the model representation to enhance the representation capability of the model. (3) The multimodal self-attention mechanism that captures cross-modal associations and the biaffine classifier with Taylor polynomial loss function that optimizes training iterations further improve the learning efficiency and prediction accuracy. The results on the real corporate report dataset show that our proposed model can more accurately extract the relations from Chinese corporate reports compared to other baseline models, where the F1 score reaches 85.76%.

The effect of corporate governance attributes on human capital disclosure in South Africa

The disclosure of human capital (HC) information in corporate reports continues to be at the centre of discussions in the executive boardroom. Currently, standard setters grapple with implementing uniform disclosure requirements for human capital disclosure (HCD) and as a result this information is scant, erratic, and inconsistently reported. Hence the ISO 30414 was introduced to breach this gap. The aim of the study is to critically examine how corporate governance attributes affect HCD. A quantitative based cross-sectional design was followed using a sample of top 100 companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE). The ISO 30414 HR reporting framework containing 48 metrics was utilised to construct an assessment instrument with a 7-point scale to assess the extent of HCD. Overall, board meeting attendance yielded positive statistically significant association with HC information disclosed on recruitment, retention rate, turnover rate, internal mobility rate, competency rate, employee value-added, absenteeism rate. The board of directors play a critical role in improving the disclosure of HC information in the integrated reports. The study provides first empirical evidence on the impact corporate governance attributes have on HCD using the ISO 30414 HR reporting framework.

Adoption of Life Cycle Thinking: Impact-driven comparative assessment of Japanese construction corporations’ trends in practices

Although life cycle thinking offers a well-founded set of concepts, methods, and tools for organizational contexts, only little is known about its relevance in the construction sector. In this sector, construction corporations are key players. In this work, a novel impact-driven method to assess the adoption of life cycle thinking by construction corporations is introduced. Japan, as a high-income country with a relatively long history of environmental policies informed by material flow analysis, is chosen as the context. Five Japanese construction corporations and respective reporting are used as case studies. Trends in environmental impacts over time of the case study corporations are assessed using two indicators: resource and carbon productivity. In comparison, an automated text corpus analysis workflow is presented to explore the corporate report’s life cycle thinking-related content in a meaningful way. Comparing the period of 2014–2018 and 2019–2023, an overall relative increase in framework adoptions (77%) and their integration in corporate categories (85%) in corporate reports indicates its increased procedural relevance among Japanese construction contractors. Findings show how the carbon indicator is embedded in various frameworks and, for instance, reveal an increased relevance of Scope 3 emissions as a framework on a low level. However, Scope 3 is also utilized as a performance indicator. To this end, considerable temporal differences in adoption practices are observed. Finally, a potentially effective corporate adoption model is identified through the comparative research design. The proposed method can be applied to other construction corporations and regional contexts.

The Visibility of Climate‐Related Disclosures by Large Australian Companies

Mobilising the work of Brighenti (2007), we assess the visibility of climate‐related disclosures across different reporting venues and sectors for the 2022 reporting period. We do so by analysing the content of the corporate reports of 28 ASX50 companies. This is supplemented by articles published in the Australian media and on prominent activist investor websites. We find that physical climate risks are often under‐reported or superficially addressed in company reports, whereas transition opportunities related to a low‐carbon economy are more frequently disclosed. This discrepancy suggests a pattern of selective disclosure emphasising more favourable outcomes and potentially obscuring the full spectrum of climate‐related risks and opportunities. In contrast, transition risks are supra‐visible because of the attention from media and activist investors—particularly in the energy and materials sectors. Our results reflect concerns raised by regulators with regard to greenhushing (the withholding of information) of physical and transition risks and greenwashing (exaggerated claims) of transition opportunities. We also find inconsistencies in reporting practice, with implications for comparability and the faithful representation of climate‐related information.

ESG Reporting of Commercial Banks in Poland in the Aspect of the New Requirements of the Directive on Corporate Reporting in the Field of Sustainable Development (CSRD)

For several years, commercial banks in Poland have been reporting activities related to the impact on the environment, society, and corporate governance (ESG). However, only new guidelines, mandatory for many entities, including banks, will allow for comparing these reports, which will be of great importance mainly for investors. The forms of these reports were and still are different, difficult to compare in individual years, and difficult to compare between banks. The article aims to present the banks’ preparation for the new reporting rules based on the latest ESG reports. The research was conducted in four groups of commercial banks operating in Poland. These are the largest companies listed in the WIG Banks sub-index of the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Gaps in the preparation of these banks for non-financial reporting were identified. The non-financial reports of the banks studied have significant information potential that can be used by various stakeholder groups, including investors, customers, employees, regulators, and local communities. However, the comparability of ESG reports is one of the key challenges faced by both reporting banks and users of these reports. The research results can be used both in scientific works and by bank representatives to improve non-financial reports.

GRI guidelines in developing countries: uncovering the antecedents and consequences

Purpose Framed under the upper echelons theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of board characteristics on the adoption of the global reporting initiative (GRI) guidelines for corporate disclosure and, consequently, their effect on the company’s market value. Design/methodology/approach To achieve the research objective, the authors investigated the impact of certain important board characteristics, such as board independence, size, gender diversity and director skills. The authors examined the adoption of GRI guidelines by 371 companies based in Latin America. Using logistic regression and panel data analysis, the authors tested five hypotheses. Findings The findings can confirm the upper echelons theory, showing that directors have an important role in determining environmental policies and strategies in their companies. The authors confirm that three characteristics affect GRI adoption in Latin America: independence, gender diversity and skills of board directors. The authors also found that companies that adhere to the GRI tend to perform better in terms of market capitalization. Practical implications Managers who want their organization to perform better in terms of GRI disclosure must understand that characteristics such as board independence, gender diversity and directors’ skills play a significant role in the company adopting the GRI for corporate disclosure. Furthermore, managers must be aware that by adopting the GRI, the company increases its market value through market capitalization. Originality/value The literature is still unaware of how the adoption of GRI can bring financial returns to organizations that adopt this type of standard to disclose their corporate reports. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first empirical paper to investigate the antecedents and consequences of GRI adoption in Latin America.

ERP Systems - Reliable Tools in Corporate Reporting of Organizations

ERP Systems - Reliable Tools in Corporate Reporting of Organizations

Assessing Large Language Models Used for Extracting Table Information from Annual Financial Reports

The extraction of data from tables in PDF documents has been a longstanding challenge in the field of data processing and analysis. While traditional methods have been explored in depth, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers new possibilities. This article addresses the knowledge gaps regarding LLMs, specifically ChatGPT-4 and BARD, for extracting and interpreting data from financial tables in PDF format. This research is motivated by the real-world need to efficiently gather and analyze corporate financial information. The hypothesis is that LLMs—in this case, ChatGPT-4 and BARD—can accurately extract key financial data, such as balance sheets and income statements. The methodology involves selecting representative pages from 46 annual reports of large Swiss corporations listed in the SMI Expanded Index from 2022 and copy–pasting text from these into LLMs. Eight analytical questions were posed to the LLMs, and their responses were assessed for accuracy and for identifying potential error sources in data extraction. The findings revealed significant variance in the performance of ChatGPT-4 and another LLM, BARD, with ChatGPT-4 generally exhibiting superior accuracy. This research contributes to understanding the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in processing and interpreting complex financial data from corporate documents.

Деятельность российских нефтегазовых компаний в Арктике: теория и практика резильентности в эпоху декарбонизации

Addressing global climate change presents a shared challenge, particularly for the development of the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation (AZRF) and for industrial companies operating in the region, including oil and gas producers. Given the strategic role of hydrocarbon development in the AZRF for ensuring Russia’s energy security and the responsibility of oil and gas companies in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it is critical to examine their role in enhancing the resilience of the AZRF amidst global decarbonization efforts. This article aims to provide a theoretical and practical analysis of the relationship between organizational and territorial resilience in the context of climate change. It focuses on the measures taken by Russian oil and gas companies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and minimize the anthropogenic impact of their operations in the AZRF. The empirical basis for this study is drawn from the corporate reports of the largest Russian oil and gas companies. Through a review of contemporary Russian and international research, key risks to the resilience of economic systems in the AZRF are identified. A conceptual framework is proposed, highlighting the role of oil and gas companies in supporting the resilience of the AZRF, particularly through decarbonization initiatives aimed at mitigating the effects of climate change, such as permafrost thawing. Content analysis has been used to categorize the environmental and industrial safety measures, as well as decarbonization efforts, undertaken by Russian oil and gas companies in the AZRF. The study concludes by outlining the various decarbonization scenarios and strategies implemented by these companies in the AZRF.

Role of AI and Digital Transformation in Corporate Reporting: A Bibliometric Review

This systematic literature review (SLR) aims to investigate the role and evolution of the academic literature on the role of AI and digital transformation in corporate reporting from a bibliometric perspective. The study follows the PRISMA framework and collects Web of Science, Scopus, and Semantic Scholar literature, yielding 617 records. After screening and eligibility assessment, 192 studies were finally included in the review. The study uses Biblioshiny, the R package for analysing scientific production, citations, author and journal impact, collaborations, and VOSviewer for visualising co-occurrence network mapping of keywords and research trends over time. Further, content analysis is used to explore the role of digital technologies, its benefits, challenges, and future trends in digital technologies integration in corporate reporting. The analysis reveals Troshani, Rowbottom, Locke, and Lehner as key contributors and the global impact led by China, the UK, the USA, and Hong Kong, China. Digital transformation, sustainability reporting, and fintech are emerging trends. Digital technologies automate data collection and analysis, improving the quality of financial and non-financial disclosures. Improved accuracy, real-time insights for decision-making, and risk mitigation were benefits while facing challenges regarding data privacy, required technical expertise, algorithmic biases, and regulatory issues. Future trends involve predictive analytics, technology integration, and AI auditing.

The demand for reporting environmental sustainability and social responsibility: insight from Saudi Arabia corporate reports

Purpose In countries where disclosing and reporting matters on sustainability are optional, what are the drivers promoting voluntarily disclosing information related to social responsibility and environmental sustainability corporate environmental and social responsibility? Exploring drivers promoting the demand for voluntarily disclosing information related to social responsibility and environmental sustainability in Saudi Arabia, where regulatory and professional bodies have not mandated information on corporate environmental and social responsibility, motivates this study. Design/methodology/approach A total of 48 individuals voluntarily participated in the survey. Findings Findings reveal that creating a better social, ethical and mental image, building a public relations image for the company, improving stakeholder trust in the company, signaling to investors the company’s care for the earth to meet the ethical motivation of stakeholders, enhancing corporate social responsibility awareness and exhibiting surpasses the mere generation of profits, all derive such disclosure. Such disclosure also signifies the firm’s value as well as improves the overall firm’s economic performance. Practical implications Regulatory and professional bodies must issue and adopt reporting models for entities, principally private companies, whether publicly traded or not, of the content. Their reports should aim to inform users and stakeholders about fulfilling the social and environmental responsibilities of entities toward society and its members. Social implications Out of the drivers for the demand, perceptions of elders toward meeting ethical motivation of senior management significantly differ from that of younger. Originality/value Few studies have been attempted on drivers of the demand for reporting environmental sustainability and social responsibility in an environment where such reporting is not mandated. This study offers insight from Saudi Arabian corporate reports.

Artificial intelligence and wealth inequality: A comprehensive empirical exploration of socioeconomic implications

This study introduces a global database on artificial intelligence (AI) capital stock and related AI indicators. Using the data constructed, we investigate the impact of AI and capital stock accumulation on wealth inequality, a dimension not extensively explored in the literature. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on the socioeconomic consequences of AI, with implications for scholars, policymakers, and corporate executives. An innovative database detailing AI capital stock is developed by incorporating data from various sources, including corporate reports, industry databases, and scholarly literature. This novel dataset, focusing on the US, the EU, and Japan from 1995 to 2020, is a critical resource for future investigations. The research methodology is centered on an extended Solow–Swan model, conceptualizing AI as a form of capital that can substitute for or complement traditional forms of labor. A panel-corrected standard errors model is used to analyze the data, accounting for potential cross-sectional dependence and heteroscedasticity. Our findings reveal a positive and statistically significant correlation between AI technology adoption, AI capital stock accumulation, and wealth disparity. The analysis further indicates a complex interaction between income and wealth disparities, suggesting a mutually reinforcing cycle. This study fills a significant gap in the existing literature by offering a novel perspective on the distributional impact of AI. Our results underscore the importance of considering the broader socioeconomic implications of AI, extending beyond considerations of immediate productivity and economic growth. This study offers valuable insights for policy formulation and business decision making, emphasizing the necessity of a comprehensive understanding of the influence of AI on wealth distribution.

Types of intertextuality in Chairman’s statements

Intertextuality is a pervasive feature of all discourse, but norms and conventions vary widely across domains. Academic conventions can cause difficulties for those who have been exposed to, or move on to, domains with other practices. Academic conventions are well documented; here we examine those of business writing. We created a corpus of chairman’s statements from annual corporate reports and searched them for signalled and unsignalled intertextual relationships. We hypothesise that statements from the same company will be linked by both repeated phraseology and acknowledged intertextuality.

The conjoint effects of corporate social responsibility performance and report tone on financial constraints: Evidence from China

Using corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure data from Chinese A-share listed firms between 2008 and 2022, we examine the conjoint impact of CSR performance and the tone of CSR reports on financial constraints. The research reveals a significant negative correlation between CSR performance and financial constraints, indicating that the better a firm's CSR performance, the fewer financial constraints it faces. The tone of CSR reports is also negatively correlated with financial constraints. It has a synergy effect with CSR performance, enhancing the alleviating effect of CSR performance on financial constraints. After conducting a series of robustness tests, such as addressing endogeneity and substituting variables, the main results remain robust. Furthermore, relative importance analysis shows that the impact of CSR performance on financial constraints is significantly greater than the impact of the tone of CSR reports. In additional analysis, we also examine the effects of corporate disclosure of creditor protection information, the presence of deficiencies in information, and firm transparency. Against the backdrop of heightened economic volatility and escalating risks, our findings offer valuable guidance on how firms can strategically utilize social responsibility measures to mitigate financial constraints.

Corporate culture's influence on the transparency of financial reporting in Iran: an in-depth analysis of readability and tone

PurposeThis study investigates the influence of corporate culture on financial reporting transparency within Iranian firms.Design/methodology/approachLeveraging a dataset of 1,480 firm-year observations from the Tehran Stock Exchange spanning from 2013 to 2022, the study employs text mining to quantify linguistic features of corporate culture and transparency, specifically readability and tone, within annual financial statements and Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) reports.FindingsOur results confirm a positive and significant relationship between corporate culture and financial reporting transparency. The distinct dimensions of corporate culture — Creativity, Competition, Control, and Collaboration — each uniquely enhance financial transparency. Robustness tests including firm fixed-effects, entropy balancing, Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), and Propensity Score Matching (PSM) validate the profound influence of corporate culture on transparency. Additionally, our analysis shows that corporate culture significantly affects the disclosure of business, operational, and financial risks, with varying impacts across risk categories. Cross-sectional analysis further reveals how the impact of corporate culture on transparency varies significantly across different industries and firm sizes.Research limitations/implicationsThe study’s scope, while focused on Iran, opens avenues for comparative research in different cultural and regulatory environments. Its reliance on text mining could be complemented by qualitative methods to capture more nuanced linguistic subtleties.Practical implicationsFindings underscore the strategic importance of cultivating a transparent corporate culture for enhancing financial reporting practices and stakeholder trust, particularly in emerging economies with similar dynamics to Iran.Originality/valueThis research is pioneering in its quantitative analysis of the textual features of corporate culture and its impact on transparency within Iranian corporate reports, integrating foundational theoretical perspectives with empirical evidence.

Современные виды корпоративной отчетности: их содержание и принципы формирования

New conceptual approaches in the context of sustainable socio-economic development of society predetermined the processes of evolution of corporate reporting and the introduction of new types of reporting into management practice. The information preferences of individual groups of interested users suggest different target orientations of corporate reports. The lack of unity in approaches to understanding the essence of corporate reporting has led to interest in studying the diversity of its types. Purpose of the work: research and systematization of approaches to the content of corporate reporting and its components, their target orientation and principles of formation, classification of reports in the corporate reporting system. Methods and results of the study: using a systematic approach and general scientific methods of cognition, analysis, synthesis and generalization, approaches to understanding the essence of corporate reporting are systematized, the constituent elements of the corporate reporting system are identified, trends in the development of corporate reporting and its regulatory regulation are considered, types of corporate reports are determined according to the target directions and principles of their formation.

Exploring cultural futures: Dimensions of projectivity as a methodological lens for narrative analysis

This paper discusses the applicability of the cultural sociologist Ann Mische’s (2009) nine “dimensions of projectivity”, or modes of orientation to the future, as methodological tools for narrative analysis to identify cultural formations of future orientation. Future orientation is understood here on the level of cultural regularities, rather than individual cognition. The paper discusses the exploratory process of operationalising Mische’s dimensions on texts produced by the volunteer panel of the Mass Observation Project (MOP) on the topic of ‘Futures of Consumption’. We explore how the difficulties encountered were addressed to utilise the dimensions for analysis. This exploratory process led to the classification of these dimensions into three categories, which specify their methodological utility. Firstly, literary components, suitable to analyse projectivity in professionally produced future narrations, such as corporate or NGO reports. Secondly, cognitive competences, suitable to study texts for the capacity for future thinking they demonstrate. And thirdly, formative orientations: the implicit, cultural repertoires from which actors construct their orientations to the future. The latter proved operationalizable in the analysis of the MOP data to identify cultural formations of future orientation. The paper provides a nuanced understanding of the application and utility of methodological tools for the study of future orientation.

Corporate reporting by cooperatives: Mapping the landscape and identifying determinants

Cooperatives conform to a model that is different to what is normally understood to be an enterprise, with distinctive interpretations of property rights, governance, and values. A unique characteristic of cooperatives’ corporate reporting is it essentially addresses member-owners, and not shareholders. Despite this, most research has been performed from the perspective of investor-owned firms. The aim of this study is to obtain an understanding of the nature and extent of the adoption of corporate reporting conventions, and to identify the determinants of such adoptions by cooperatives, by means of ordinal regression and binary logistic models on a sample drawn from the Global Top 300 cooperatives. Despite the expectations implicit in the differences in the users of financial reports (cooperative members), there was a lack of cooperative-specific reporting in that the most common categories of published corporate reports are still annual reports and annual financial statements. Approximately half of the cooperatives publish environmental and social reports, governance reports and/or management reports, while only a miniscule number publish integrated reports. Results also suggest the stakeholder, legitimacy, institutional, transaction cost and agency theories help to explain the determinants for the of adoption of corporate reporting. We have identified common determinants (market, country and institutional factors) for the adoption of cooperative reporting, as well as idiosyncratic determinants that are unique to cooperative entities. We found that cooperatives with external shareholders are more likely to adopt environmental and social, management and governance reporting. Idiosyncratic determinants indicated that cooperatives who more assertively draw their attention to their identity are more likely to adopt annual reporting. Cooperatives who limit the distribution of profits to members only are also more likely to adopt management reporting.