“Does board composition have an impact on CSR reporting?”

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting plays a key role in management con-trol, particularly in light of the increased demand for non-financial reporting after the financial crisis of 2008–2009. This literature review evaluates 47 empirical studies that concentrate on the influence of several board composition variables on the quantity and quality of CSR reporting. The author briefly introduces the research framework that underpins current empirical studies in this field. This is followed by a discussion of the main variables of board composition: (1) committees (audit and CSR commit-tees), (2) board independence, (3) board expertise, (4) CEO duality, (5) board diversity (gender and foreign diversity), (6) board activity, and (7) board size. The author, then, summarizes the key findings, discusses the limitations of the existing research and offers useful recommendations for researchers, firm practice and regulators.


INTRODUCTION
Society's increasing awareness of environmental, social and governance issues has contributed to a transformation in the way business is conducted (Kolk and van Tulder, 2010; Seuring and Mueller, 2008), particularly in terms of external reporting systems.Corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a modern management concept has been rapidly increasing by public interest entities (PIEs).As the term "CSR" is heterogeneously used in research literature, our interpretation of CSR deals with the triple bottom line concept and the business case model, indicating that economic, environmental and social aspects are equal within stakeholder management (Carroll, 1999).CSR within a company indicates that companies are responsible not only for maximizing profits, but also for recognizing the needs of their relevant stakeholders such as employees, customers, etc. Successful CSR management should lead to voluntary CSR reporting as a complement to classical financial accounting (e.g., financial statements, group/management reports).CSR disclosures may be included in the annual report or be separated to a "stand-alone" CSR report (Rao and Tilt, 2016).A CSR report covers environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues in line with widely recognized CSR reporting standards, e.g., the guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).CSR reporting is a key information tool of PIEs to increase stakeholder relations, especially about the firms' ESG performance (Murphy and McGrath, 2013).In the end, if CSR management has been conducted successfully and is included in CSR reporting, a positive impact on CSR performance may be the consequence.On the one hand, the usefulness of CSR reports has led stakeholders to demand even greater decision usefulness of CSR reporting (Moneva et al., 2006;Ramus and Montiel, 2005).On the other hand, literature states that information overload and greenwashing as current practice lower the validity of CSR reporting (Mahoney et al., 2013).This has resulted in an increased significance of CSR reporting in business practices while also making this topic a focal point of recent empirical CSR research.Empirical studies examining the factors of influence that affect CSR reporting and the potential implications have primarily been conducted on the board system (Dienes et al., 2016;Malik, 2015).Given the lack of mandatory CSR reporting in most legal systems, management has extensive freedom of discretion and flexibility when it comes to how these companies portray themselves in their CSR reports.This means that each individual company can influence their CSR reports and (selectively) manipulate its informational value to suit its information policy (Darus et al., 2014).
After the financial crisis of 2008-2009, (inter)national standard-setters (e.g., the European Commission) initiated several reform measures to strengthen the quality of board composition (e.g., board diversity), on the one hand, and CSR reporting, on the other hand.The adoption of the Directive 2014/95/EU in the European member states has great implications for board diversity and CSR reporting (Federation of European Accountants, 2015; Johansen, 2016;Monciardini, 2016), as specific PIEs must prepare a non-financial declaration and a diversity report as part of the corporate governance statement.The relationship between board composition and CSR reporting is also a growing topic of empirical research from an international perspective (Jain and Jamali, 2016; Malik, 2015).Prior empirical research has focused on the link between board composition variables such as internal corporate governance and measures of CSR reporting and, over the last few years, a growing number of studies have been carried out that have incorporated a statistical examination of the impact of specific board composition variables (e.g., gender diversity) on the quality and quantity of CSR reports (Sharif and Rashid, 2014).But the results of these studies are characterized by a high level of heterogeneity.
In this literature review of empirical-quantitative studies, we concentrate on board composition as a key aspect of internal corporate governance and note that external corporate governance (e.g., shareholder concentration) can also be important in influencing the quantity and quality of CSR reporting.According to the underlying research framework of our literature review, CSR reporting may be mainly influenced by the following variables of board composition: (1) committees (audit and CSR), (2) board independence, (3) board expertise, (4) CEO duality, (5) board diversity (gender and internationality), (6) board size, and (7) board activity.
The objective of this analysis is to evaluate the existing empirical studies on the impact of board composition on CSR reporting.We see a major benefit of linking the two topics board composition and CSR reporting in one literature review in view of the following aspects.Current empirical research, regulatory and practical literature states that there is an interaction between board composition variables and CSR reporting measures that can be expressed by the term "sustainable corporate governance" (Paetzmann, 2016).Successful stakeholder management, in turn, depends on efficient board composition and decision-useful CSR reporting and, ultimately, can lead to stakeholder trust.As researchers, regulators and companies are more and more aware of this relationship, there is little knowledge about the current state of empirical research on that topic.Insofar, our literature review contributes to the present literature, as we analyze, for the first time, which board composition variables are mainly used in international research and which variables are statistically related to CSR reporting measures.
Our literature review is based on the methodology of vote counting of significances (Light and Smith, 1971).A quantitative literature analysis in the form of vote counting focuses on the significant findings and their respective signs, but ignores the specific coefficient values.The underlying primary studies are assigned the expressions significant positive (+) and significant negative (-).In comparison to former narrative literature reviews that are related to broader corporate governance determinants or CSR output variables, our methodology can lead to a clear result in which board composition variables are significantly linked with CSR reporting.We are aware of the limitations of vote counting.The methodology of a quantitative meta-analysis, which gets more and more attractive in recent empirical corporate governance and CSR research, is not useful in this situation because of the heterogeneous board composition variables in our sample.Furthermore, the amount of studies that relates to one specific composition attribute is too low for a meta-analysis yet.
Our literature review makes several contributions to the present literature, because it synthesizes a number of major new insights from the existing literature and offers a new and rich discussion of future avenues of research.Our review is aimed at researchers, regulators, and practitioners alike.It provides starting points for future research activities in terms of investigating the link between board composition and CSR reporting variables.We portray which board composition variables are commonly used in empirical research, explain the restrictions of these items and recommend additional variables that should be reflected.The findings also provide an important impetus for the analysis and development of recent CSR and corporate governance regulations.As already stated, several board composition variables, especially board diversity, are currently regulated as a useful instrument in order to strengthen CSR reporting (see Directive 2014/95/EU).Our review will contribute to this regulatory discussion by showing possible outcomes of this reform measure.Finally, we would like to motivate corporate practice to recognize the interactions of board composition and CSR reporting activities as key elements of stakeholder relations.This review is structured as follows.First, the research framework is presented from a theoretical and empirical perspective, followed by an appraisal of the studies' empirical findings.In so doing, we first present the methodology followed by a detailed analysis of empirical studies that relate to CSR reporting quantity and quality.Finally, the review considers the limitations of existing empirical research and makes useful recommendations for future research, stressing some practical and regulatory implications.

BOARD COMPOSITION AND CSR REPORTING FRAMEWORK
For the purposes of this literature review, a research framework is useful to contextualize the main strengths of the existing research (see Figure 1

Methods
The empirical studies included in this literature review were chosen by comparing international databases (Web of Science, Google Scholar, SSRN, EBSCO, ScienceDirect) along with several other libraries.To this end, a targeted search was conducted for the keywords "corporate (social) responsibility reporting", "corporate (social) responsibility disclosure", "CSR reporting", "CSR disclosures", "sustainability disclosure", as well as "sustainability reporting", "environmental reporting", and "social reporting".In parallel, the search was either broadened by the addition of the broader term "corporate governance" or narrowed by the addition of specific variables (e.g., gender diversity).In the further course of our literature review, contributions were examined for the suitability of their study design.We did not limit our selection to a specific country.A temporal limitation was not useful given our limited number of studies; we focused only on archival studies as the dominant research method in this field.For reasons of quality assurance, only the contributions published in international (English) journals with double-blind review were included.The following overview of current research on board composition and CSR reporting variables allows one to systematically map and analyze the current international body of research within our framework.A quantitative literature analysis in the form of vote counting (Light and Smith, 1971) helps to focus on the most significant findings and their respective indicators, but ignores the specific coefficient values.The underlying primary studies have been assigned the expressions significantly positive (+), negative (-), and no impact (+/-).In comparison to other narrative literature reviews on broader topics (e.g., total corporate governance or CSR), we clearly stress the link between board composition and CSR reporting.Vote counting is a very common method in corporate governance and CSR research, but not conducted in this research topic yet.We are aware of the fact that vote counting is a limited method for synthesizing evidence from multiple evaluations, which involves comparing the number of significances.Vote counting does not take into account the quality of the studies, the size of the samples, or the size of the effect.These limitations are decreased by a quantitative meta-analysis.Our board composition variables are too heterogeneous to conduct a meta-analysis.A meta-analysis for one board variable is also not possible in view of the restricted amount of studies.
Our review makes several contributions to earlier work, because it synthesizes a number of major new insights from the literature and offers a rich discussion of future avenues of research.In contrast to former reviews on related topics (

LIMITATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
Ever since the early studies on board composition by Halme and Huse (1997) and Haniffa and Cooke (2005), the topic of whether and how board composition variables affect CSR reporting has gained more and more momentum in empirical-quantita-tive corporate governance and CSR reporting research.In addition to heterogeneity of the results of the analysis of the board composition variables, also, the CSR reporting measures are not comparable.In this context, we would like to stress the main limitations the included studies.First, multi-period observations, comparisons of an international sample of companies, and multivariate regression and sensitivity analyses were not available in every case so that a valid measurement of the influence factors was not always possible.Only 11 of the 47 included studies chose a multinational sample in order to control for country-specific effects (e.g., case law versus code law, culture, and strength of the enforcement regime).The results of single-period analyses are restricted, for example, owing to legally driven changes in reporting behaviors over time that are only visible through a multi-period observation.No study directly focuses on possible impacts of the financial crisis of 2008-2009 on CSR reporting.Furthermore, sensitivity analyses or endogenous tests were not included in many studies.In this context, we have to mention that also a reverse relationship between CSR reporting and board composition may be possible.The quantity and quality variables used in the studies were also limited to content analyses of the CSR reports with an individual scoring metric.The respective content criteria and the scoring models, thus, have a degree of subjectivity, which potentially reduces the validity of the results.A weighting of the content criteria through a previous survey of CSR representatives can only partially reduce this limitation owing to a subjective selection of the representative groups.The comparability of the studies is likewise restricted, because, in addition to general analyses of board models and systems, corporate governance is subject to country-specific arrangements.Lastly, the studies under consideration focused on the one-tier system (with one exception for the German two-tier system by Dienes and Velte, 2016).As the one-tier system is not comparable to board composition effects in the two-tier system (management board and supervisory board), the transformation of the results of the included studies to other regimes (e.g., European member states) is not possible.
After explaining the limitations, we would like to give useful recommendations for researchers, practitioners and regulators.Critical reflection of methodological limitations offers a starting point for future improvements in study designs.If a reasonable number of studies exists, we suggest performing quantitative meta-analyses of selected board composition variables in the future.Meta-analyses get more and more attractive in current accounting and corporate governance research.A meta-analysis that focuses on the link between board composition and CSR reporting is not useful yet in view of the huge heterogeneity of the board composition variables and the CSR reporting measures (quantity and quality).We propose future meta-analyses on the link between board independence or gender diversity on CSR reporting quantity if they represent a satisfying amount of studies with regard to the international discussion.
Although the current literature review relies on board composition as group level corporate governance (see Figure 1 in Appendix), we stress that there are further variables of corporate governance (institutional, firm, and individual levels) that have interdependencies with group-level variables.As a result, these effects should be measured by means of interaction and/or moderation terms in future statistical models.The board composition variables that were taken into account in previous studies have interdependencies as well and should be specified.With respect to gender diversity, it remains open to question whether the presence of women in boards has an impact on CSR reporting.Thus, it remains to be analyzed to what extent female presence has a positive influence on the quality of reporting.The critical mass theory (Konrad et al., 2008) indicates that a critical mass of women in boards is necessary to change board attitude towards CSR reporting.Surprisingly, up to now, management compensation and the structure thereof has not been analyzed along these lines.
In the line with these recommendations, future research should also include other board composition variables that might have an impact on CSR reporting.The first useful variable to include in future CSR reporting research is board tenure diversity (Rao and Tilt, 2016b).In this context, the impact of the one-tier and two-tier system, which represent the different EU member states, should be analyzed.In addition to this, it seems to be important to analyze the different branches of non-financial industries to a greater extent (e.g., pharmacy, automobiles) as the contents of CSR reporting might differ.
Furthermore, no empirical study has analyzed the impact of board composition variables on integrated reporting from a national or multinational perspective.Integrated reporting and CSR reporting and their interactions should be studied in future research designs.Empirical research on integrated reporting is most necessary but not easy to realize in view of these aspects.This is connected with a heterogeneous quality level of integrated reporting and integrated thinking from an international perspective.
In line with our research contributions, our literature review also has main regulatory implications.In contrast to the US capital market, the European legislator and also other regimes (e.g., South Africa) have finalized several reform initiatives on board composition and CSR reporting since the financial crisis of 2008-2009.The intention of the regulators is to increase the motives for a broader stakeholder management that should result in a decision-useful CSR reporting.It is an important challenge and remains unclear to date if these regulations will positively contribute to board effectiveness and CSR reporting so far.
The related implementation and transaction costs and the market implications of a "good" CSR reporting for PIEs are rather a "black box".A sustainable and ethical management behavior won't be generally generated by stricter regulations on board composition and CSR reporting.The great discussion of green washing of CSR reporting and boilerplate information indicates that the board of directors must implement a sustainable vision and philosophy as a top down approach in accordance with the total employees and a consistent stakeholder dialogue.But in the end, every management of PIEs will focus on the financial performance so that the great challenge lies in the connection between financial and non-financial indicators (integrated thinking) as proposed in the voluntary integrated reporting model.
Finally, we would like to point out some practical implications.In general, the included studies in our literature review found rather low quality scores from an international perspective in their descriptive statistics.Insofar, there are many possibilities for improvements for CSR reporting activities from a practical view.Management should not only be aware of the CSR reporting costs, but also of the positive link to firm reputation and stakeholder trust, which could lead to better CSR and financial performance in the long run.However, involvement in CSR practices may not generally be transformed into CSR reporting (Majeed et al., 2015).Insofar, firms without CSR reporting can be active in CSR management and may plan to introduce a CSR report in future.
Even though some studies indicate that PIEs have higher CSR disclosure scores, also, small and medium sized entities are aware of CSR, especially family firms.Also, our results are not restricted to a special branch of industry.But it is important to have a clear research strand on financial institutions (e.g., Kilic et al., 2014) and stress that the traditional banking systems with its focus on financial reporting and financial key performance indicators must be extended by non financial value drivers.

CONCLUSION
As a supplement to financial accounting, CSR reporting according to the triple bottom line provides economic, environmental, as well as social information on corporations to various stakeholders on a voluntary basis.As CSR reporting is closely linked to internal corporate governance and management control, the present literature review analyzes the impact of the main board composition variables on CSR reporting quantity and quality: board committees (esp., audit and CSR committees), board independence, board expertise, CEO duality, board diversity (esp., gender and foreign), board activity, and board size.
We provided a stakeholder (agency) theoretical framework in which the central significance of board composition on CSR reporting, as well as the research framework employed in the respective studies are highlighted.We, then, provided a detailed literature analysis of the results of existing empirical research on the impact of board composition on CSR reporting.Following this, we outlined the data generation and research methods used in these studies (1) along with a separate evaluation of CSR reporting quantity (2) and CSR reporting quality (3).The results of the 47 studies indicate that the majority of the included studies rely on CSR reporting quantity and focus on developing countries.With regard to the analysis of branches of industries, there is a remarkable concentration on the banking industry in some research designs.We, then, explained current research limitations and offered recommendations to researchers, practice and regulators about future aspects in board composition and CSR reporting.While CEO duality, board activity and board size are commonly used as board composition variables, their explanatory power is limited in view of the diverse theoretical impact on CSR reporting.We found that board independence and gender diversity are also often used as proxies for board effectiveness, but other related factors, e.g., board expertise or foreign diversity are very rare.We encourage future researchers to include more board composition variables, e.g., multiple directorships, board tenure, in line with the empirical corporate governance research in other topics.To increase the validity of research in this area, additional qualitative research designs, e.g., surveys, interviews or case studies of the board, will be useful.We also criticize the diverse CSR reporting measures in view of their lack of comparability and the restricted objectivity, especially by measuring CSR reporting quality and propose a detailed stakeholder dialogue before establishing a weighted disclosure score.
Remarkably, the existing research primarily focuses on board systems in developing countries in the Asian region.Furthermore, the banking industry is focused in some research designs.In view of the huge regulatory measures within the EU in the context of board composition and CSR reporting (e.g., EU CSR Directive), future research should analyze their relationship in a multinational sample of EU member states with one-tier and two-tier systems with a separation of different branches of industries.Furthermore, on the basis of an international comparison, the US and European corporate governance system (insider versus outsider model) should be analyzed to a greater amount.
Finally, the growing importance of integrated reporting for PIEs questions the further development of CSR reporting.Some companies have even started to replace their "traditional" CSR report and imple-ment an integrated report.The interpretation of integrated reporting by the IIRC is an additional reporting instrument that complements the CSR report as a compromized report that includes the material information of the financial and CSR report.Insofar, integrated reporting can have a huge impact on CSR reporting as well.This could positively affect the scope and quality of empirical content analyses of all forms of reporting in the future, as the quantification of non-financial items are crucial for stakeholder management.In this context, we are aware of the fact that UK was one of the drivers of integrated reporting within the EU and future studies on the impact of the "Brexit" resolution should be kept in mind.The applicability of recent research results on CSR reporting to integrated reporting had to be neglected owing to the divergent frameworks of CSR reporting and integrated reporting.Nevertheless, it must be assumed that recent research designs tailored to studying board composition and CSR reporting will be used for integrated reporting in the coming years.
Amran et al. (2014) is the only included study that found a positive link between the implementation of CSR committees and CSR reporting quality in a multinational sample from the Asia-Pacific region.Their quality measure was linked to a weighted score of several items, e.g., the adoption of CSR reporting guidelines.Board independence was found to have a positive link to CSR reporting quality in the Islamic financial institutions sector in a multinational sample(Abduh and AlAgeely, 2015).The same results were stated byJizi et  al. (2014) for a US sample of banks and by Htay et al. (2012) for Malaysian banks.Jizi et al. (2014) relied on the Haniffa and Cooke (2005) structure, but used a weighted quality score, whereas Htay et al. (2012) deducted an individual score.In contrast to these positive results restricted to the banking industry, Alotaibi and Hussainey (2016) state a negative link between independence and CSR reporting quality in Saudi Arabia outside the banking sector, measured by the compliance with IFRS framework characteristics.A negative relationship was also found by Prado-Lorenzo et al. (2009) for Spanish companies.In their study, the weighted CSR reporting quality score was measured by the existence of triple bottom line disclo-sures, GRI adoption and compliance with GRI by management.Fernandez-Gago et al. (2016) also came to the conclusion in a Spanish setting that board independence is related to better CSR reporting quality (based on the Observatio Score) and that firm performance (Return on Assets) moderates this relationship.With regard to the CEO duality model, Jizi et al. (2014) found a positive impact on a weighted quality score CSR reporting as a modification of the Haniffa and Cooke (2005) structure by US banks.The analysis by Dienes and Velte (2016) is the only study with a clear focus on the German two-tier system and the supervisory board composition.Based on an external CSR reporting quality score ("IÖW (!!!Author decrypt)/future score"), the authors state that gender diversity in the supervisory board increases CSR reporting.Fernandez-Feijoo et al. (2012) analyzed 250 companies in 22 countries and deducted an individual quality score with selected criteria as publication of a standalone report or CSR strategy disclosures.Gender diversity in the board of directors was positively related to CSR reporting.In a multinational study by Frias-Aceituno et al. (2013), only gender diversity and not foreign diversity contributes to better CSR reporting quality.Finally, the results on board size as a board composition variable are mixed.According to Abduh and AlAgeely (2015), board size is negatively related to CSR reporting in the Islamic banking industry.In a Saudi Arabian setting outside the banking sector, Alotaibi and Hussainey (2016) also found a positive impact of board size on CSR reporting.The same result was stated by Janggu et al. (2014) for 100 Malaysian companies, by Jizi et al. (2014) for listed commercial US banks and by Frias-Aceituno et al. (2013) in a multinational setting.
Dienes et al., 2016; Jain and Jamali, 2016; Rao and Tilt, 2016a; Malik, 2015; Elsakit and Worthington, 2014; Hahn and Kühnen, 2013; Fifka, 2012; Guan and Noronha, 2011), we provide a clear structure for empirical research, concentrate on board composition and CSR reporting, and present the main results of the empirical research according to a vote counting methodology.Guan and Noronha (2011) only analyzed Chinese research studies without any focus on corporate governance issues and other countries.Fifka's review (2012) was organized by countries or regions without a clear focus on board composition.In their review, Hahn and Kühnen (2013) stressed that governance issues at the levels of company and country are key research gaps in empirical CSR reporting research, but did not analyze the relevant studies in detail.The review by Elsakit and dence, and foreign diversity.Malik (2015) took a broader view of CSR activities, but CSR reporting was only part of his analysis.We already explained that it is not useful to match CSR perfor-2016; Muttakin et al., 2016; Rao and Tilt, 2016; Benomran et al., 2015; Sundarasen et al., 2016; Kilic et al., 2015; Majjed et al., 2015; Muttakin and Subramaniam, 2015; Sharif and Rashid, 2014; Ali and Atan, 2013; Khan et al., 2013; Said et al., 2009).Furthermore, other CSR disclosure quantity measures with regard to CSR reporting guidelines or external ratings (ISO 26000: Habbash, 2016; GRI: Handajani et al., 2014; Faisal et al., 2013; Prado-In view of the huge discussion of gender diversity from an international perspective, current empirical research recognizes this diversity variable and only secondarily other dimensions (e.g., foreign diversity).In line with other output factors of gender diversity research (e.g., CSR performance), the results are heterogeneous.For the banking industry in Turkey and Kenya, Kilic et al. (

Table 1 .
Count of cited published papers