State of the art of IR disclosure in Europe. A research agenda

Abstract

Even if the topic of the Integrated Reporting (IR) disclosure is widely discussed among scholars and practitioners, more research is needed in order to have a better understanding of the evolutionary path of the adoption of IR across Europe. Therefore, the paper aims to analyze the development paths of IR in Europe, considering the IR of listed firms published between 2011 and 2016, and available in the Integrated Reporting Emerging Practice (IIRC) Examples Database. Furthermore, this research aims to identify a set of issues for further research in the field of IR. Empirical results show the pace of diffusion of IR in Europe. In particular, results in the European setting highlight that the number of IR after the global financial crisis is similar for each year in the sample time period with the exception of the year 2012 in which there is a drastically decrease in the number of integrated reports. This paper also highlights which factors of the firms are relevant or not in adopting such a reporting framework. Practitioners can benefit from this study since they could be aware about the process of implementation of IR among firms belonging to different industries in Europe.