Corporate Accountability Reporting Conference 2013
Corporate Accountability Reporting Conference 2013
The conference will be held at the Harvard Business School in Boston, MA.
Conference on "Research in Corporate Accountability Reporting"
Harvard Business School, January 18, 2013
In the last decade, a growing number of for-profit corporations across the world have started voluntarily augmenting their annual financial reports with reports on "corporate sustainability," "corporate social responsibility," and "corporate environmental performance," among others. As of April 2011, there are over 32,000 such reports on the Corporate Register, a database archiving "global corporate responsibility" reports. Relatedly, a number of private organizations have emerged that bundle the standard setting and assurance/ auditing activities for corporate accountability reporting, including the Global Reporting Initiative, B Lab, and AccountAbility. The financial crisis of 2008-2009 has generated additional momentum for corporate accountability reporting. Speaking as a member of the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council, Sir Martin Sorrell argued, "Companies should talk less about the benefits to shareholders of short-term profits and focus on customer needs, investment in labor, and sustainability." Corporate accountability reporting is broadly consistent with at least two hypotheses: (1) such reporting augments shareholders' demand for information and monitoring; (2) such reporting responds to non-shareholder constituents' demands, potentially, but not necessarily, at shareholders' expense.
As public corporations devote more resources to corporate accountability reporting that differs from traditional corporate financial reporting, there is a demand for a better understanding (or explanation) of the phenomenon. For example:
- Descriptively speaking, what exactly is corporate accountability reporting and what forces drive its demand? How does the current corporate accountability reporting differ from corporate social responsibility of the 1970s and Milton Friedman's New York Times Magazine article (September 13, 1970)?
- What are the measurement properties of corporate accountability reporting? Is such reporting material, comparable, conservative, and verifiable? How do assurance and auditing affect the quality of corporate accountability reporting?
- How do the properties of corporate accountability reporting vary across jurisdictions and with the relative strength of stakeholder groups such as labor unions, environmental activists, and community activists?
- Does corporate accountability reporting change corporate culture and firm behavior? Does corporate accountability reporting lead to firms internalizing some of the potential externalities of corporate decision making?
- Do firms tie executive compensation to corporate accountability reporting? If so, what are its consequences?
- What are the stated objectives of corporate accountability? Does corporate accountability reporting achieve, on average, its stated objective? Does accountability reporting have measurable economic consequences? What are the determinants of such economic consequences?
On January 18, 2013, Harvard Business School will host an academic conference for research on corporate accountability reporting.
Rebecca M. Henderson
Harvard Business School
S.P. Kothari
Journal of Accounting & Economics
Karthik Ramanna
Harvard Business School
Ross L. Watts
Journal of Accounting & Economics