Integrated Reporting and Stakeholder Engagement: The Effect on Information Asymmetry

The aim of this study is to analyse the possible relationship between integrated information disclosure and the degree of information asymmetry. Additionally, we analyse this relationship in firms characterised by higher/lower financial reporting quality and those located in environments defined by strong/weak investor protection. The initial results obtained after applying the panel data methodology confirm that there is a negative relationship between information asymmetry and the disclosure of an integrated report, which indicates that using this tool to inform can help to mitigate agency problems, facilitate corporate decision‐making and improve the information among investors. Further, our first complementary analysis shows that the integrated report effect is more statistically significant relative to information asymmetry in countries with strong investor protection. We can also observe in the second complementary analysis that companies that report a lower quality of financial information have a more important reduction effect on asymmetric information than firms with higher‐quality annual accounts. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment