What does Ownership Structure tell us about Integrated Reporting of Polish listed Companies?

Abstract

This paper aims to link the quantity and quality of information disclosed in Integrated Reports of the Polish listed companies with their ownership structure, through which we explore the manifestation of governance mechanism. Our study investigates two main problems in the literature concerning factors and logical relations explaining companies' disclosure patterns in the information reported to stakeholders; the first concerns measures of the quantity and quality of disclosure, and the second is focues on the explanation of the relations. Our paper addresses both issues by proposing an application of advanced textual analysis tools to assess the quantity and quality of the information disclosed. Second, contrasting to the great majority of existing research that is based almost exclusively on correlation methods with linearity assumptions, this study presents a practical implementation of the QCA tool to analyse how the ownership structure influence the company disclosure patterns. The results obtained in this study may be of great importance to the governance of companies and IR prepares and regulators.