• Energy Research

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data are in high demand in financial markets. However, the ESG data provided by companies do not allow for use in the investment decision-making process. The main limiting point for this is a lack of comparability across companies. This paper analyzes the problem of comparability with the aim to evaluate the intra-industry comparability of sustainability reports, framing the analysis on Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards and discussing the results with the support of legitimacy and stakeholder theories. Drawing upon stakeholder and legitimacy theories, as well as financial and sustainability accounting concepts, we propose a theoretical framework of comparability and a methodology to evaluate the level of comparability on a sector-specific basis. The methodological approach adopted in this study is broadly qualitative, with the use of a multiple-stages model. Based on the example of one industry, we discovered that, despite comparability being mostly relevant to the listed companies from the oil and gas sector, the sustainability reports of these companies are still not comparable. Our findings reveal that, despite the availability of a large amount of ESG data and the existence of sustainability frameworks, the problem of comparability is still relevant even for companies that are theoretically most inclined to be comparable.

In a context of widespread acceptance and implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), this paper discusses the possible relationship between intellectual capital (IC) and nonfinancial information (NFI), particularly related to SDGs and corporate social responsibility (CSR) in a stakeholder engagement perspective. Prior studies called for further investigation about nonfinancial risk disclosure and claimed that companies mandated to disclose risk-related information tend to focus mainly on financial risks. Therefore, given the growing attention of regulators to the content of mandatory companies’ NFI brought to the Directive 2014/95/EU, this study intends to contribute to fill this literature gap by investigating the drivers of risk-related disclosure quality (RDQ) and to what extent it could be affected by the structural capital (SC), as one of the components of IC. The empirical analysis is based on a sample made of 51 Italian large undertakings and groups. The study uses content analysis to assess the RDQ from firms’ corporate reports. Regression analysis is used to examine if there is an influence of SC toward RDQ, both considered as a single information package and with specific reference to environmental disclosure. Results reveal that a positive association exists between RDQ and SC. Moreover, it is providing some support for the positive correlation between SC and the firm’s size. In this sense, the paper contributes to existing risk reporting literature as a pioneering study identifying an IC driver to determine the quality of risk and risk management information. For regulators, this study highlights how, in a context of mandatory disclosure, the quality of information could also depend on firm characteristics (SC). For practitioners, the paper helps in understanding the role of IC in order to increase the quality of the corporate risk reporting.

The concept of value, where shareholders are the main recipients of the created value, is changing towards more comprehensive models, which respond to the increased stakeholder awareness and urgent sustainability agenda. Hart and Milstein (2003) elaborated the widely used sustainable value concept in which they characterize temporal and spatial dimensions of value, and suggest strategic drivers for sustainability. Although the framework is highly cited, there is no review on the changes over more than ten years. In this paper, we adopted a structured literature review methodology to discover how the concept of sustainable value has been used by researchers and how it has been developed. Our findings show that sustainable value has mainly been used as the general phrase to describe positive business results instead of using it as a concept. Scholars, who make an in-depth analysis of sustainable value do not emphasize the time horizon of sustainable value as its peculiar characteristic while broad stakeholder surrounding is called to be an important feature of sustainable value. Additionally, strategic drivers for sustainability have moved from being purely environmental as in Hart and Milstein’s (2003) concept: globalization, economic fluctuations, and knowledge innovation have become as important as green technologies and carbon-reduction policies.