We use Transparency International's ratings of self-reported anticorruption efforts to analyze factors underlying the ratings. Our tests examine whether these disclosures reflect firms' real efforts to combat corruption or are cheap talk. We find that the ratings are related to enforcement and monitoring, country and industry corruption risk, and governance variables. Controlling for these effects and other ratings determinants, we find that firms with lower residual ratings have higher subsequent citations in corruption news events. They also report higher future sales growth and show a negative relation between profitability change and sales growth in high corruption geographic segments, but not in low corruption segments. The net effect on valuation from sales growth and changes in profitability is close to zero. The findings are robust to a number of sensitivity tests, including analysis of disclosures for a larger sample over multiple years. We conclude that, on average, firms' disclosures signal real efforts to combat corruption.

Using newly available materiality classifications of sustainability topics, we develop a novel dataset by hand-mapping sustainability investments classified as material for each industry into firm-specific sustainability ratings. This allows us to present new evidence on the value implications of sustainability investments. Using both calendar-time portfolio stock return regressions and firm-level panel regressions, we find that firms with good ratings on material sustainability issues significantly outperform firms with poor ratings on these issues. In contrast, firms with good ratings on immaterial sustainability issues do not significantly outperform firms with poor ratings on the same issues. These results are confirmed when we analyze future changes in accounting performance. The results have implications for asset managers who have committed to the integration of sustainability factors in their capital allocation decisions.

Targets are an integral component of management control systems and play a significant role in achieving desirable performance outcomes. We focus on a key environmental performance objective—reduction of carbon emissions—as a setting in which to examine how target difficulty affects the degree of target completion in long-term non-financial performance. We use a novel dataset compiled by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and find that firms setting more difficult targets complete a higher percentage of such targets. We also find that this effect is negatively moderated by the provision of monetary incentives. We corroborate this evidence by showing that target difficulty is more effective for carbon reduction projects requiring more novel knowledge and in high-pollution industries. We discuss limitations and suggest avenues for future research.