CSR Disclosure and Information Asymmetry: The Role of Financial Reporting Quality

Abstract

Based on firm-level data from 39 countries, over a nine-year period, this study analyzes whether financial reporting quality and CSR disclosure are related to each other in improving the quality of corporate information. The findings show that firms disclosing a greater amount of CSR information have a lower degree of information asymmetry (bid-ask spread). This relationship is less pronounced in firms with high financial reporting quality. It suggests a substitution association between financial reporting and CSR disclosure in reducing information asymmetry. Financial transparency is therefore an important factor to explain the informativeness of CSRD. With a high financial transparency, CSRD provides less incremental information content to the investors. However, the robustness tests show that CSRD decreases the quality of financial analysts’ forecasts. This seemingly contradictory result might be explained by firms engaging in differentiated information disclosure to cope with contradictory social and institutional pressures (investors versus financial analysts).