Does corporate governance improve integrated reporting quality? A meta-analytical investigation

What is it about?

The relationships between integrated reporting quality (IRQ) and corporate governance characteristics have been studied extensively but the results are still inconclusive and, sometimes, contradictory. This situation offers an opportunity to systematize the results of previously published studies on the relationship between corporate governance and IRQ. We employ several complementary theoretical perspectives (agency, stakeholders, and signaling theory). We fill the research gap by discovering significant meta-analytic relations between IRQ and various aspects of the corporate governance system: board attributes and composition, the existence of a social responsibility committee, the quality of the audit committee, integrated report assurance, and ownership structures. The sample consisted of 57 papers published in top journals between 2015 and 2021. All corporate governance indicators from these papers were extracted. The meta-analytic procedures were applied on bivariate and partial correlations between IRQ and the identified corporate governance characteristics. The results confirmed that director independence, the existence of a social responsibility committee, institutional ownership, and hiring a Big 4 auditor were the most important correlates of IRQ. On the other hand, board gender diversity, audit committee independence, and dedicated assurance have a positive but non-significant impact on IRQ. Chairperson-CEO duality does not seem to impact report quality, while ownership concentration has a negative but nonsignificant impact on IRQ. Several recommendations for researchers were derived from these meta-analytic results.

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