Determinants for assurance – a country-level corporate governance system analysis

Abstract

An increasing amount of organisations acquire voluntary third-party assurance on their sustainability reports, which resulted in an increasing amount of research towards the determinants for assurance on sustainability reports. The analysis in this research has been done with 17.036 firm-year observations over the time-period 2002-2017 (17 years) and across 25 countries. The research confirms the positive relationship between corporate sustainability performance, the existence of an audit board committee or the environmental sensitivity of the industry an organisation operates in and third-party assurance on sustainability reports. Further, this research adds the effect of the country-level corporate governance system to these relationships. The study finds that organisations with a better performance on sustainability are more likely to acquire third-party sustainability assurance when they are located in an Anglo-Saxon country. Moreover, there is no evidence that the country-level corporate governance system has an effect on the relationship between the existence of an audit board committee or the environmental sensitivity of the industry the organisations operates in and the determinants for an organisation to acquire third-party assurance on their sustainability reports.