Research on the Combinative Disclosure Strategy of Corporate Financial Reports and Social Responsibility Reports
From interviews with executives of listed companies in China,the international standard and the institutionalized ideas of CSR in the domestic society together comprise the internal and external forces for enterprises to fulfill their social responsibility.According to the statistics of China Association of Listed Companies,the percentage of listed companies independently preparing and disclosing their 2023 social responsibility reports is as high as 39.7％,and the disclosure ratio has continued to rise in recent years.With the Shanghai,Shenzhen and Beijing Stock Exchanges uniformly releasing the"Guidelines on Sustainable Development Report of Listed Companies",sustainable development and social responsibility disclosure has virtually stepped into the exploration stage,and how to effectively standardize and guide listed companies to improve the quality of social responsibility disclosure has become the focus of capital market disclosure supervision.In essence,CSR reports are the mapping and presentation of the current operating process in non-financial dimensions,can be cross-validated with the financial information,and are an important piece of information for external parties to judge the future operating prospects.Besides,CSR itself is a multidimensional and comprehensive concept,there is perceptual ambiguity in the understanding of CSR performance by users,and CSR reports are mainly covered by non-quantitative narrative texts,which greatly facilitates management's manipulation of rhetoric and other aspects.Meanwhile,prior studies have implicitly suggested that CSR reports are used by management to hide negative financial news,but the existing studies still lack conclusive evidence.Based on the concurrent disclosure perspective,this paper explores whether management uses CSR reports as a tool to harmonize financial performance.The research finds that the sensitivity of the tone of CSR report to financial performance is significantly higher in the loss domain than in the gain domain,and thus the tone is concave at the expected financial performance threshold overall,and the concavity is more pronounced when the firm's external resource dependence is stronger and its social responsibility goals are more important,reflecting that management utilizes the attribute framing effect of positive tone to ameliorate the negative expectations formed by external parties on the firm due to loss aversion.Besides,the tone concavity is more pronounced when management's space for manipulation in financial reporting is compressed.The research further shows that the expectation management strategy of CSR reporting tone is only reflected in less boilerplate reports,reflecting that the managerial strategy based on affective rhetoric exist boundaries of information quality.Finally,the research finds that other characteristics of CSR reports also exhibit concavity at expected financial performance threshold.The research contribution of this paper may exist in the following points.CSR reporting is gradually developing into an important information vehicle to be disclosed together with financial reporting,while existing literature has shown a clear separation between the two.This study breaks through the focus on a single disclosure,innovatively discusses the manipulation strategies of CSR reports based on financial performance motives,and provides evidence that management seeks manipulation space from CSR reports when financial disclosure manipulation is limited,enhancing the understanding of the interrelationship between these two important disclosure.Second,prior research shown that CSR reporting as a useful information supplement instead disrupts the capital market information environment.Combining prospect theory and attribute framing effect,the research provides a possible explanation for the underlying mechanism of the above findings.In terms of disclosure regulation,this paper inspires regulators to fully recognize the fundamental nature of CSR disclosure as narrative information,and to enhance the materiality,balance and reliability of social responsibility reports through ex ante uniform reportinging standards,the introduction of natural language analysis technology into the regulatory toolbox,and internal and supervising listed fiurms to establish and improve governance institutions and internal and external auditing systems related to CSR.
万方数据
维普
