Identification of Corporate Governance Mechanisms which Enhance the Credibility of CSR Disclosure

Corporate social responsibility reporting has experienced a tremendous growth during the last decade. However, a lot of debates have arisen upon managers’ motivation behind the publication of sustainability reports and their credibility. In order to address this problem companies throughout the world started to assure their CSR reports and use GRI framework for revealing non-financial information. The proposed research aims to analyze the effect of companies’ corporate governance characteristics on their decision to assure sustainability reports or publish them within GRI standards. Previous research mainly concentrates on different groups of factors which enhance the credibility of CSR reporting, while this study suggests the view of CSR reporting quality as a function of company-, industry-, and country-related factors. The results of the paper may reveal the importance of various corporate governance characteristics in relation to credibility of CSR reporting and become a theoretical base for further research.