Business Commons^™

Sustainability Reporting And Stakeholder Engagement In Spain: Different Instruments, Different Quality, Silvia Romero, Silvia Ruiz, Belen Fernandez‐Feijoo

Department of Accounting and Finance Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The purpose of this paper is to compare the quality of the sustainability information issued following the three most common reporting models: annual report (addressed to shareholders), sustainability report (addressed to stakeholders), and integrated report (addressed to shareholders). To this aim, we create a quality index based on previous literature, analyzing the content of the sustainability information disclosed by Spanish listed companies during the years 2013 to 2015. We find that companies issuing sustainability reports or integrated reports provide higher quality information than companies including their sustainability information within the annual report. We also find that sustainability reports are issued …