The aim of our research is to analyze how different religions influence business ethics. We develop an index of practices in the field of business ethics, made up of 19 items containing practices related to workers, consumers, products, human rights, management of ethical conflicts, and crime prevention. Also, we consider a wide range of religion affiliations. To undertake this research, we use a panel data sample composed of 11,956 firm‐year observations from 18 countries. Drawing on stakeholder theory, we posit some (...) hypotheses based on the religions considered. The results obtained show that a higher percentage of religious adherents in the country where a company does business usually involve the implementation of more ethical practices in the corporate field. These findings are obtained for Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu religions. In contrast, this does not stand for Buddhist and folk religions. Also, countries where there is no predominant religion do not show a confluence between religion and ethical corporate practices. (shrink)

Integrated reporting, as a novel corporate reporting approach, focuses on how six forms of capital promote corporate value. This paper explores whether this kind of multiple capitals disclosure framework has an impact on the capital market. Using a sample of Chinese A-share firms from 2012 to 2016, we examine the relationship between MCD quality and firm value. The results indicate that a higher MCD quality leads to a greater firm value. Our results are robust to a variety of sensitivity tests. (...) Further evidence suggests that MCD quality could increase profitability by affecting the decision-making of non-financial stakeholders and enhance the value relevance of financial information by affecting the decision-making of investors. The paper helps understand how the IR approach affects the perception of investors on the value of a firm. The findings of the paper are of interest to academics, corporate management, investors, and governmental officials. (shrink)

Voluntary disclosures of sustainability information have recently received considerable attention by investors, regulators, and public companies in improving reliability and integrity of corporate reporting. We examine the association between the quantity and quality of sustainability disclosures and earnings quality in the context of corporate ethical value and culture. We posit that sustainability disclosures of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance reports are linked to earnings quality, because of the importance of both earnings quality and ESG sustainability disclosures to investors and (...) trustworthiness of corporate reporting. We collect our sample of 35,110 firm-year observations between 1999 and 2015. Using both difference-in-difference tests and OLS regression, we find that sustainability disclosure quantity is positively associated with innate earnings quality and negatively correlated with discretionary earnings quality in mitigating managerial earnings manipulation and unethical opportunistic reporting behavior. Further tests illustrate that sustainability disclosure quality can strengthen the positive relation between innate earnings quality and sustainability disclosure quantity and mitigate the negative relation between discretionary earnings quality and sustainability disclosure quantity. Finally, additional tests suggest that the relation between earnings quality and sustainability disclosure quantity is moderated by corporate structure and prior-year sustainability performance. Our results provide policy, practical, and research implications as ESG sustainability reporting is being integrated into corporate culture and business models. (shrink)

Corporate governance (CG) is a key area of management with important implications for business ethics. The interface of CG and business ethics is populated with rich intellectual debates on the role of ethics in governance from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within these debates, the relationship between CG and outcomes for business and society, and the role of CG structures and processes and their comparative aspects across institutional settings are discussed. Despite a proliferation of research at the interface of CG and ethics, (...) we observe that an engagement with topics, methodologies, and expected outcomes drawing on established frames and theories of CG tends to the ignoring or even the preclusion of an explicit engagement with debates in business ethics. Through this VSI, we as section editors showcase previously published papers in the Journal that proactively explore the explicit linkages and interfaces between CG and ethical societal challenges, with the aim of inspiring further such CG research. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of whether and how public action via civil society and/or government can meaningfully shape industry-wide corporate responsibility behaviour. We explore how, in principle, ICR can come about and what conditions might be effective in promoting more ethical behaviour. We propose a framework to understand attempts to develop more responsible behaviour at an industry level through processes of negotiation and coalition building. We suggest that any attempt to meaningfully influence ICR would require stakeholders to possess both (...) power and legitimacy; moreover, magnitude and urgency of the issue at stake may affect the ability to influence ICR. The framework is applied to the retail banking industry, focusing on post-crisis experiences in two countries—Spain and the UK—where there has been considerable pressure on the retail banking industry by civil society and/or government to change behaviours, especially to abandon unethical practices. We illustrate in this paper how corporate responsibility at the sector level in retail banking is the product of context-specific processes of negotiation between civil society and public authorities, on behalf of customers and other stakeholders, drawing on legal and other institutions to influence industry behaviour. (shrink)