Informative Value of Non‐Financial Reports: Analyzing the Impact of Disclosure Format and Auditing

Since the Non‐Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) came into force in 2017, large, listed companies in the European Union (EU) are obliged to disclose non‐financial reports annually. Accordingly, Member States transposed the Directive into national law with country‐specific rules. Thus far, quantifying the informational content has proven to be difficult. Therefore, we applied an innovative text‐mining approach to assess the informative value of non‐financial reports and its influential determinants, the so‐called Sustainable Fingerprint. This method measures how precisely environmental, social, and governance (ESG) topics and time references are disclosed in non‐financial reports. The aim of our paper is to analyze the informative value of non‐financial reports from companies in the main stock indices of France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden after the national NFRD implementation. Our results show that incorporating the non‐financial report in the annual report and the audit committee expertise (ACE) are positively related to the informative value, whereas external assurance has no significant impact.