Requirement of G4 standards as common practice in sustainability reporting makes it important to understand the readability of such reports. This study contributes to the extant body of literature by assessing the readability of sustainability reports. We investigate several factors such as company size, company age, complexity, domestic versus international, and audited versus unaudited reports and how they contribute to the readability of sustainability reports. We apply text analytics to U.S. and Global firm issued sustainability reports. We also provide evidence about factors that may contribute to the readability of sustainability reports. We find that reports of companies in regulated industries are less readable than other firms' reports. We also find that less complex firms have more readable sustainability reports. This study should provide some insights to users of sustainability reports, standard setters for reporting standards, and for future researchers.

Theoretical basis The impact of corporate governance on internal controls and quality of financial disclosures. Research methodology Analysis of a real financial fraud event for a non-US multinational corporation. The case relies on accessing and analyzing annual reports for the firm, both before and after the fraud. Additional information on industry governance characteristics are provided in the case itself so that students can compare the firm to the industry. Case overview/synopsis This business case is centered on the analysis of Schneider Electric, a French multinational corporation, which had to restate their financial statements in 2011 because of accounting fraud. Following this event, Schneider undertook major changes in their board structure to improve internal control mechanisms. This pedagogical business case familiarizes students with international differences in ownership and board structure and emphasizes potential corporate governance changes after financial statement fraud. Complexity academic level Managerial finance, corporate finance, international finance, auditing. This case is more appropriate for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses.

Assessing microcredit programs by testing their contribution to the empowerment of borrowers has been widely advocated and explored in the literature on women and development. There is considerable debate on whether microcredit empowers or disempowers women, and there are attempts to reconcile conflicting conclusions based on heterogeneous samples or data sets and grounded in a variety of methodologies. Although there is little agreement on the relation between microcredit and empowerment and no consensus on the meaning of the idea of empowerment itself, students of gender and development seem to be at one in regarding empowerment as a logically unproblematic concept. We argue that the idea of empowerment employed in this literature is vulnerable to a number of logical criticisms and cannot serve as a sound basis for determining the value of microcredit to borrowers. Our research suggests that in assessing the impact of microcredit, it is essential to consider generational and inter-generational differences it makes in the lives of borrowers and their families. Results of ethnographic work conducted in January 2008 on long-term borrowers of the Grameen Bank inform the exposition of the arguments.

In today's global marketplace, the Philippines provide a unique example of an Asian culture with established economic ties to the West. In this study, Philippine and United States undergraduate business students responded to 13 vignettes describing questionable ethical actions in business situations. Results reveal significant differences between groups for 9 of the 13 vignettes. For 4 vignettes, Philippine participants were more disapproving of the actions, and for another 5, United States participants were more disapproving. The study suggests that cultural differences continue and the implications of these differences should be considered in today's global economy.

This study investigates factors indicating CFO intentions of fraudulent financial reporting. Structural equation modeling is used to analyze survey data obtained from 139 CFOs. We find that an extended reasoned action model fits the data well and explains CFO intentions to report fraudulently. More specifically, we find that CFOs of large companies are more likely to report fraudulently in the financial statements and that compensation structure is not a good indicator of CFO intentions to report fraudulently. Informal and formal audit methods for assessing management attitudes toward fraudulent reporting, such as questionnaires and automated decision aids, are recommended since they offer the best opportunity to improve significantly auditors' ability to predict fraudulent financial reporting. Implications for future research and practice development are considered.

This study adapts the theory of reasoned action (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980) to the behavior of fraudulent reporting on financial statements so as to examine the effects of moral reasoning and self-monitoring on intention to report fraudulently, using structural equation modeling. The paper seeks to investigate two of the red flags for financial statement fraud identified in Loebbecke et al.'s (1989) paper: client management displays a significant lack of moral fiber and client personnel exhibit strong personality anomalies. As expected, high moral reasoners are more influenced than low moral reasoners by their own attitude towards the behavior. Contrary to prior research, low self-monitors are found to be more influenced than high self-monitors by subjective norms. Future research is recommended to investigate the counter-intuitive results for self-monitors, to consider the implications of group decision making as regards the promulgation of fraudulent financial statements, and to examine additional red flags for financial statement fraud.