Banca de DEFESA: SABRINA PAULINO DE OLIVEIRA

CORPORATE CHARACTERISTICS AND COMPLIANCE OF INTEGRATED REPORTS IN BRAZIL REGARDING GUIDELINES RELEASED BY THE IIRC

Integrated Reporting; Conformity; Brazil.

The business environment has become increasingly competitive, complex, and demanding, giving rise to the need for integrated reports that showcase not only the financial reality but also the social and environmental aspects. The Integrated Report (IR) comes to supply the need that the market seeks, synthesizing all this information, assisting in the better decision-making of its stakeholders. Although there is a consistent trend of companies embracing the adoption of integrated reporting, there is a lack of national studies that assess the compliance of these statements and its consonance with the framework established by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC), as well as which business characteristics can influence the quality of the statement mentioned. Therefore, the general objective of the study is to investigate the relevance of certain business characteristics to the level of quality of integrated reports in Brazil. The population designated for the analysis of this research will be composed of companies listed on [B]³ – Brasil, Bolsa, Balcão –, with its shares traded on the Brazilian stock market on 12/31/2021, and Brazilian state-owned companies. The exclusion of the financial and insurance sectors occurred because both have operational and asset activities distinct from the others. The sample comprises data from 448 companies with 1,673 observations. In that regard, data will be collected on the RefinitivEikon database, terms of reference, financial and non-financial statements on the companies' website. The analysis will cover the period from 2018 to 2020, justified by the regulation and mandatory disclosure of Integrated Report of state-owned companies according to Law Nº. 13.303/2016, which established a period of 24 months to make the necessary adaptations to suitability, as well as, the market incentive for private companies also adopt the disclosure of the integrated report. For the conduction of the analyses, the methodology of Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression was employed, applied to unbalanced panel data. As for the results of the econometric models, concerning Model 4 (with companies from [B³] and compliance greater than 0), it is possible to observe that a significant result was found for one variable of interest: Company Size (FSIZE). Meanwhile, for Model 6 (with state-owned enterprises and compliance greater than 0), it is possible to observe that significant results were found for the variables of interest: Board Size (BSIZE), Financial Capacity (FCF), and Age (AGE).