Corporate responsibility reporting in the UK and Japan

Abstract

There is an increasing concern for the environment and society in today’s world. Stakeholders call for corporations to take responsibility for the impact that their organisational activities have on the environment and society by publicly disclosing such impacts and how they are being managed. Thus, the practice of corporate responsibility reporting (hereafter CRR) has been established. Unlike the provision of financial information in an annual report, CRR tends to be a voluntary reporting practice. As firms have the choice to provide CRR, logical economic thinking says that they will only do so if they derive some benefit from it. Therefore, the objective of this study is to investigate whether CRR is associated with firms’ market values in order to assess whether CRR provides incremental value relevant information to investors.